To continue a discussion which we were having here, and because Iacobus and I don’t post nearly often enough about Romano Amerio, that genius of Iota Unum fame, I have excerpted here some sections from Amerio’s chapter on the Sacrament of Matrimony. This might also be a good time to put out a public plea on the web: Would someone please translate for us Romano Amerio’s Stat Veritas? (Stat Veritas is Amerio’s commentary on Pope John Paul II’s Tertio Millenio Adveniente.)

Chapter XXXIX

The Sacrament of Matrimony

–New Concept of conjugal love and marriage

Although the changed thinking on this matter is not set down in black and white anywhere in the Council’s texts, and although it has been attacked by the more active supporters of tradition, Cardinal Felici being the chief among them, it has nonetheless now been widely accepted and has become a common opinion in the Church. The Council itself does state that among the new developments in the Church, the “spirituality of matrimony” is undergoing continual reformulation, and that changes in modern society “are manifesting ever more clearly in various ways the true character of marriage.” Obviously the Council was not intending to deny that matrimony had always had a spirituality of its own in the Catholic system. What it is talking about then is a new spirituality.

The change is accompanied by the usual euphemisms praising the various kinds of help that modern society is supposedly providing for marriage and the family. Nothing, it would seem, could make the scales fall from the Council fathers’ eyes: neither the adoption of divorce by all formerly Christian states, nor the fact that trial marriages have now become common, nor the fact that contraception has been made legal or even compulsory, not even the widespread legalization of abortion, though all of these phenomena were known to the council and deplored by it….

The procreative goal of marriage was called its primary end, and the natural perfecting or fulfilling of the spouses was called its secondary end. The latter expression can be taken in various senses, but what it meant in substance was “an end consequent upon the primary end”; it did not mean “an end of lesser or secondary importance.” The real meaning is that it is in the goal of generating offspring that the spouses find their personal fulfillment, and if that full physical union and its possible consequences were not there, then there could indeed be a moral union of another kind, but it would not be a conjugal relationship.

Procreation and union are thus equally true goals in marriage, but tradition has tended to emphasize the former. In this view, the spouses pursue the goal of generating offspring and of educating that offspring, and it is in so doing that they exercise their mutual love and find fulfillment as spouses….

The traditional doctrine on marriage as union directed essentially towards procreation is given a new twist by the Council when it describes it as a “communion of life and love,” with procreation following upon that. Thus in the Council’s teaching, the essential equality of the two ends is maintained, but the procreative end can be seen as “secondary” to the personalist end, if “secondary” is taken in its true sense, explained above, of following upon something else: secundum est quod sequitur….

The reason the Council’s teaching is so distinct . . . is that it proclaims marriage to be based upon friendship rather than desire, and teaches that conjugal affection is directed from one person to another as an act of will; thus the marriage bond itself is brought into being by a consent of wills. The tendency of American ecclesiastical tribunals to define marriage by reference to its persistence as a communion of life and love, rather than by reference to a specific and irrevocable act of consent, has been condemend by Paul VI and John Paul II.

The tendency after the Council to give equal emphasis to procreation and love, even in the specifically sexual sphere as distinct from marriage as a whole, leads on to a separation of these two ends, and then further to placing the expression of love above procreation, and then ultimately to the legitimacy of contraception; this tendency is obviously out of harmony with the teaching the Church has hitherto maintained. As Cardinal Felici showed, the Council itself maintained in the drafting of Gaudium et Spes that bonum prolis primum locum tenet.

This objective priority of the procreative end of marriage seems to require a corresponding subjective priority in the intention of the spouses during sexual relations. Innocent XI censured the opinion that the conjugal act is free from fault when performed without any procreative intention, motivated simply by pleasure. If the goodness of conjugal union is compromised by the lack of a positive intention regarding its procreative effect, it seems marital relations must necessarily include a procreative intention. It amounts therefore to a change in doctrine to allege that the perfecting and reciprocal gift of the spouses is a sufficient intention to make conjugal relations morally good.

In dealing with the Sadducees’ captious question about the woman who had been married seven times, Jesus gives the desire to generate offspring as the reason for the existence of marriage. He says that in heaven “they will not take wives or husbands, because they will no longer die.” Here marriage is identified with the work of procreation; there is no hint of a communion of life and a reciprocal gift of personal love, which would necessarily last as long as the persons in question.

In this Gospel passage both procreation and life together are relegated to the passing world of earthly reality. In his long catechesis on the meaning of marriage, John Paul II never referred to this passage in Luke, which certainly gives priority to procreation as the raison d’etre of marriage; when mortal life ceases, procreation ceases, and when procreation ceases so does marriage. Of course, there is no objection to the idea that conjugal, filial and parental affection still exist in our heavenly life; Dante describes this beautifully in the fourteenth canto of the Paradiso; but these affections will exist in persons whose bodies have been resurrected and glorified, and they will be, so to speak, memories of the affections felt in this life, an instance, as Dante says elsewhere, of how al mondo di su quel di giu torna.

Pius XI teaches that the mutual perfecting of the spouses “can be called the primary reason and motive for marriage,” but it must be remembered that in his teaching, the mutual integration of lives that perfects the spouses includes the mutual gift of their bodies, which in the natural course of things is the source of offspring; and he regards offspring as the highest good marriage can produce. Without believing in the myths of the ancient world, we can still say that in their act of love, the spouses are their offspring: “the marriage bed upon which” as Penelope says to Odysseus “we were together our son Telemachus.”

(To buy this wonderful, wonderful book, Iota Unum, follow this link.)

I find Amerio to be going a little too fast in places here; I often cannot tell where he switches from criticising the Council to agreeing with the Council. I can tell, though, that he likes what Cardinal Felici had to say!

What most surprises me is that, in the course of his talks on the Theology of the Body so-called, John Paul never mentioned that passage from the Gospel of Luke. Is that somewhat strange or what?

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