It is a mistake commonly made today that the end of marriage is personal gratification, personal happiness. This mistake is not made merely along political nor even necessarily religious lines. Both the liberal who wishes to expand the meaning of marriage so that it includes two men, two women, or all four and the conservative who believes that marriage ought to be limited solely to the satisfaction of an otherwise sinful sexual urge are guilty in some way of treating marriage as a thing made for an individual’s pleasure. In the former case, marriage exists solely as a means to expand hedonism into a way of life so that pleasure and self-indulgence may be raised to a higher level of social approval. In the latter case, marriage serves no purpose save to limit hedonism for the salvation of each individual’s soul, or for the protection of civilizations.

In the Church today, the answer to this question of marriage is largely found in the Theology of the Body, as taught first and foremost by Pope John Paul the Great. The late pope and his followers taught a view of sexuality in which the marital act becomes an image of divine love. Marriage provides the context for sex, whose end is unitive: that is primarily procreative and secondarily the strengthening of intimacy between spouses. This teaching on sex and marriage has been a great boon to the Church, as it shows among other things that the Church’s reveres rather than rejects sex, holding it to be so holy that to engage in it outside of the bounds of marriage is more akin to blasphemy than to idolatry. That is to say, the Church under the leadership of Pope John Paul II rescued sex not only from the adulterers and fornicators, but also from the prudes and the Gnostics.

In seeing the immense contributions of Pope John Paull II with his Theology of the Body, it is often easy to overlook other writers and thinkers in the Church. As Christopher West noted in the introduction to his The Good News about Sex and Marriage: Answers to Your Honest Questions about Catholic Teaching, “John Paul’s contributions to the Church’s teachings on sex and marriage are so vast that over two-thirds of what the Catholic Church has ever said on the subject has come from his pontificate.” The late pope is not, however, the only great or even popular thinker within the Church to write on the subjects of sex and marriage—far from it, as much of his own writings were drawn and synthesized from the great mystic saints and holy philosophers of the Church: Thomas Aquinas, John of the Cross, and even Augustine.

Another thinker who has expounded on the meaning of sex and of marriage is the ever-popular teacher, the late Archbishop Fulton J Sheen. Around the same time that John Paul the Great wrote his first major work concerning sexuality, Love and Responsibility, Sheen produced his own book: Three to Get Married. Sheen begins with a poem which is a summary of the book’s contents:

It takes three to make Love in Heaven—
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

It takes three for Heaven to make love to earth—
God, Man, and Mary, through whom God became Man.

It takes three to make love in the Holy Family—
Mary, Joseph, and the consummation of their love, Jesus.

It takes three to make love in hearts—
The Lover, the Beloved, and Love.

Echoes of theological symbols abound here, beginning with the obvious statement of the Trinity in the first stanza. It is easily forgotten that numbers can have meaning, too, because numbers can be a reflection of reality. God exists as a trinity, but good and evil as a dichotomy. Two is the symbol of a contrast or of a difference: good and evil, God and Man, grace and nature, gain and loss, joy and suffering, life and death. Just so, a marriage viewed in the purely “secular” terms of a man and a woman—the human constituents only—is a marriage doomed to failure, for it is only a marriage of opposites. Opposites may attract, but attraction left to its own devices will fade, and even the best of merely human intentions will be strained to keep together that which strains to fall apart.

Three, however, is often the symbol for a reconciliation of differences. The third ingredient is God, who can reconcile all things. He gives grace to nature so that even nature reveals Him. He teaches us that to gain our lives we must first lose them. He shows us that there is joy to be found even in suffering, for it brings us nearer to His Own suffering on the cross; and that even death is the door to new life, for His resurrection could only be achieved after his crucifixion and death. In the person of Jesus Christ, He reconciled God and Man, for here God became fully Man without thereby losing His divinity. And finally, he can even to some extent reconcile good with evil, for it was out of the greatest evil in history—deicide—that He brought the greatest good of history—salvation—to Man.

Just so with marriage, there is the need for three if the marriage is to survive, live, and even thrive: the Lover (that is, the man), the Beloved (that is, the woman), and Love (that is, God). The strongest human union cannot long survive without the love of its members, and marriage is not the exception. But Sheen notes that love between a man and a woman is not merely a thing in the feelings (or even in the intellect): it is in the will.

Love is in the will, not the emotions or the glands. The will is like the voice; the emotions are like the echo. The pleasure associated with love, or what may be called "sex," is the frosting on the cake; its purpose is to make us love the cake, not to ignore it. The greatest illusion of lovers is to believe that the intensity of their sexual attraction is the guarantee of the perpetuity of their love (emphasis in original).

Though Sheen wrote this more than fifty years ago, his words still ring true today. With the liberalization of sexual education and the ready availability of contraception meant to make sex available on-demand, to say nothing of the frequency of pre- and extra-marital sex, it is not a wonder that the divorce rates in this country have sky-rocketed. Just as God has been reduced to Divine Love and then to a merely human concept thereof, so too has human love been reduced to one of its expressions, which is sex. With the availability of “consequence-free” sex-on-demand comes the lessening of the use of the will for the spouse’s sake, and thus the lessening of love for the spouse.

Nor is a marriage without sex meaningless. In his exegesis of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Archbishop Sheen notes:

A marriage, before it is consummated, represents the union of Christ with the soul through grace. But once the physical union takes place, then a marriage symbolizes the union of Christ and the Church. In the first instance, it is a symbol of the individual nature of man; in the second, his social nature….The union of Christ with the individual can be broken by sin; but the union of Christ and His Church is unbreakable and eternal (emphasis in original).

This mirrors the Theology of the Body, in which a human marriage is on the one hand the image of the unity of the Trinity, on the other the image of Christ’s marriage to His Bride, who is the Church. The love in a marriage is meant to image the love of God, both between the members of the Trinity and for the members of Christ’s Body. This love is not merely eros—which is itself an echo and an imitation of God’s unity—but also agape, the perfect love which has its source in God. Just as the Trinity cannot be divided nor the Church separated from Christ, neither can a true and consummated marriage ever be broken by divorce: a point echoed in Canon Law*.

If marriage is to give us an image of the divine life—that is, if it is to be a sacrament—then it must be both sacred and pure.

The sanctity of marriage is not something that takes place alongside marriage, but by and through marriage. The vocation to marriage is a vocation to happiness, which comes through holiness and sanctity. Unity of two in one flesh is not something that God [merely] tolerates but [rather] is something that He wills. Because He wills it, He sanctifies the couple through its use. Instead of diminishing in any way the union of their spirits with one another, it contributes to their ascension in love (emphases in original).

Later in the same chapter, Sheen writes:

Purity is not something peculiar to the unmarried alone but to the married, in the sense that both hold themselves in readiness to do God’s will and to fulfill His mystery. The purity in each differs to the extent that the will of God is fulfilled either directly or indirectly through the intermediary of another human. Purity is the merging of a great desire and passion into a cosmology. It never isolates the passion from the Divine Plan for the entire universe. Purity in the young destined for marriage begins in the young destined for marriage by being universal and develops by being particular….It begins by awaiting God’s will in general and then through acquaintance and courtship sees that will focused on one individual….But in souls consecrated to God [that is, to the celibate life], purity is never focused on a particular person but is a constant tendency to universality, by loving and praying for all men as children of God.

Here, then, is the call to both sanctity (that is, holiness) and to purity found for the married and the unmarried alike. The difference in that call is not so much its existence or even necessarily its degree, but rather its scope. The husband is to love his neighbor, but that love is practiced daily by loving his wife and later his children as well; it is in the sacrifices he makes for her and for them. The wife, too, is to love her neighbors, but this is most readily reflected in how she loves her husband and nurtures her children. Children, in turn, are meant to re-kindle the marriage:

God did not intend that strength in a man and beauty in a woman should endure, but that they should reappear in their children. Here is where God’s Providence reals itself. Just at a time when it might seem that beauty is fading in one, and strength in the other, God sends children to protect and revive both. When the first boy is born, the husband reappears in all his strength and promise…When the first girl is born, the wife revives in all her beauty and charm….Children also take away any natural shame that may have been attached to the mutual act of love. Sowing seed or planting a garden would indeed be tedious if there were no fruit. The union of two in one flesh is the overflow of the cup of love. Even in the childless marriage, the body becomes the gesture of the soul and thus a reflection of God’s increasing revelation of His Love through history….In the child the parents have a feeling that their soul-love, which expresses itself in the flesh-unity, has a function. Love now has no more shadows.

Thus are children the blessing of a marriage, and not the curse which they are so often called (often, indeed, by people who do not have any children of their own). The phrases “daddy’s little angel” and “momma’s little helper” take on a whole new meaning when viewed in this context: the children sent to a marriage help the parents not only in a physical sense, but in a spiritual one. In this sense, “daddy’s little angel” really was sent to him from heaven as an aide to grace; “momma’s little helper” really is there to help guide her back to love, both of her husband and of her God.

So much is the joyful side of marriage. But as with any human endeavor—even those which enjoy Divine assistance—there is also suffering. It is not the popular side of love, but it may be the most important, for even God’s love involved suffering in Christ’s Passion. Archbishop Sheen does not ignore even this aspect of marriage, but rather engages it; he devotes the last three chapters of his book—not counting the concluding chapter, that is—to suffering in marriage. And here, too, can God bring joy, even where it is least expected.

The cross which was given from the outside can now be offered from the inside by the Christian as part of his very self, as something so vital to his self-development in Christ that he would feel the poorer without it. To the onlooker, it seems like suffering; to the Christian, it is joy; just as to the unmarried an infant is the sum of economic expense, confinement, tears, baby sitters, measles, and worry; but to the father and mother, it is a joy and a benediction. The child, viewed as an object external to self, is a burden; but seen as a subject, it is a prolongation of personality and the fleshly symbol of their love….When one reads of the tremendous transformation of souls in the sacrament of Matrimony, one realizes that through them, as well as in a life specifically ascetic and detached, such as in the monastery and the cloister, there can be born a fiery and ardent love of God (emphases in original).

The good archbishop even goes so far as to share stories of specific individuals who, through their suffering in marriage with a spouse who was not Faithful, won both holiness for themselves and for their spouses. The suffering of the one lead to the conversion of the other, and to the deepening of the love of both.

Three to Get Married is an insightful book which offers theological, moral, and practical advice to the reader. He discusses everything from the mistakes made by well- and ill-meaning psychologists and pastors, therapists and counselors to the importance of children, all the while maintaining the focus on the centrality of God and His Love to the sacrament. It is a masterfully written classic which remains timely even today, nearly six decades after its first publication.

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*Archbishop Sheen also notes that Canon Law reflects the relationship of an unconsummated marriage as a thing which can be broke, just like man’s union to Christ through grace.

Canon law, reflecting this idea, concedes that a marriage ratum non consummatum, or a marriage in which the husband and wife have never lived together [e.g. had sexual intercourse], is breakable under certain conditions; but the marriage bond of baptized husband and wife that has been consummated is absolutely unbreakable (bold was italics in original).

It should be noted that this was written prior to the second Vatican council, during which the purposes of marriage shifted from procreation and being an aide against concupiscence to procreation and the furthering or strengthening of intimacy between the spouses. Canon Law has been since re-written in accordance with that council, but since I am not a Canon Lawyer, I do not know what it says in regards to consummated as opposed to unconsummated marriages. I imagine that an unconsummated marriage is perhaps easier to find invalid—that is, a statement of annulment is easier to obtain if the marriage is never consummated. This is akin to stating that the marriage never existed. On the other hand, the so-called Josephite marriage (one in which the spouses live celibately) is a perfectly valid form of marriage under certain circumstances, though this is most often a later development, e.g. a marriage which has been consummated becomes a celibate marriage for spiritual or more often health-related reasons.

Again, since I am not a Canon Lawyer, I would direct questions concerning the validity of unconsummated marriages to someone with more competence to answer this particular question rather than continuing to pontificate ad nauseum; I do think that every diocese has at least one Canon Lawyer, and I know that Mr Edward Peters (JD, JCD) of the Sacred Heart Seminary at least runs a blog, In the Light of the Law, and will take and sometimes answer questions pertaining to Canon Law.