Children and the raising of them should be one the Most important (next living according to God’s teachings)reasons for marriage. A couples love is the foundation to build the faith and security of that family on. Love is not an end to itself. That is why Love also includes honesty and looking out for the good of the beloved. It is definitely a much deeper pool than the sugary thing that the hippie generation ascribes to it. As a parent we are here to be strong for our children, guide them, and bring them up to be Godly and proper people for the Kingdom of God. I hope (i don’t demand) they will always love me, but, I don’t expect them to always like me. Otherwise, I’m their “buddy” and not their father. I allow them to make mistakes, and I allow them to ask for forgiveness and I forgive. This is the model that our Heavenly father gives us to follow, and it’s a pretty good one at that!

Peace to you both, and a long and happy Marriage!

Wow! That is rather a ghoulish detail…

And yes, Cpt. Tom, you’re quite right: I expected children would be a major focus of a Pre-Cana workshop, but, although they came up incidentally a number of times, there were no formal sessions about them and nothing at all was said about the obligation to have children or to raise them as Catholics. But we did hear about the importance of setting aside income for charitable giving. :-)

Consider eating. The proper end of this act is obviously to nourish our bodies, and yet eating can have important social, cultural and spiritual significance as well. It generally wouldn’t be right to say that that significance is purely derived from the proper end of eating, though the goal of nourishment is non-accidentally related to it. When we eat Thanksgiving dinner with our families, this has a deep significance for us beyond filling our bellies with food; it represents family, safety, our gratitude for our blessed lives, etc. These goods could not be immediately derived from the end of the act, and yet the end provides the ground against which the meal can have this deeper meaning. Somehow Thanksgiving really wouldn’t be the same if we were chewing food and spitting it into spittoons, or eating with the intention of vomiting the food back up afterwards. We can invest deeper meaning in it precisely as the act that it properly is: that of nourishing our bodies.

In the case of eating Thanksgiving dinner, I think it would be improper to call nourishment and (let’s just say) family togetherness “two equally important ends.” In one sense it would be perfectly right and normal for a person to value the latter more, even while recognizing that the former gives a better formal description of the end of the act of eating. But what matters is that they are each part of the same process, and it would be wrong and futile to try to pull them apart. Parallels to lovemaking should not be difficult to draw.

With respect to Vatican II changing the Church’s teaching, here is #50 of Gaudium et Spes:

“50. Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the begetting and educating of children. Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute very substantially to the welfare of their parents . . . Hence, while not making the other purposes of matrimony of less account, the true practice of conjugal love, and the whole meaning of the family life which results from it, have this aim: that the couple be ready with stout hearts to cooperate with the love of the Creator and the Savior. Who through them will enlarge and enrich His own family day by day.”

* * *
“Parents should regard as their proper mission the task of transmitting human life and educating those to whom it has been transmitted. They should realize that they are thereby cooperators with the love of God the Creator, and are, so to speak, the interpreters of that love . . . That divine law reveals and protects the integral meaning of conjugal love, and impels it toward a truly human fulfillment.” (emphasis added).

I think the authors of that book are using this passage to give their “double purpose” interpretation of the Church’s teaching on the meaning of sex:

“Marriage to be sure is not instituted solely for procreation; rather, its very nature as an unbreakable compact between persons, and the welfare of the children, both demand that the mutual love of the spouses be embodied in a rightly ordered manner, that it grow and ripen.”

But that is talking about marriage not sex. There are certainly other goods that marriage has as an end (e.g. friendship), but even these other goods are ordered towards having and raising children as the opening sentence of #50 makes clear. So despite having PhDs they still got it wrong.

Personally, I’ve never quite understood von Hildebrand’s “meaning” (or was it his “end”?) in this statement. What’s the relationship between “end” and “meaning”?

For the baptism, the Priest Father Phil, actually did something interesting. We insisted on having the baptism during mass even though the lay “chaplain” only gave us the option of outside of mass. Father Phil took the opportunity to actually explain what he was doing during the baptism, what all the elements meant (the oil, the water, etc.) and took time to do the ceremony correctly. It was the most orthodox thing I’ve experienced since I’ve been here.

Incidentally, this baptism font has an interesting historical note. Apparently it was at this font that Margaret Sanger (Founder of Planned Parenthood) was baptized, as she was born in Corning and attended our church as a little girl. Not exactly great history….