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Image: Wedding Ring, depicting Christ uniting the Bride and Groom, 7th century (Musée du Louvre)
Pope Francis’ Catechesis. The Spirit and the Bride 10.
The Holy Spirit guides the people of God towards Jesus our hope.
Topic:; The Holy Spirit and Christian Marriage
Saint Peter’s Square – Wednesday, 23 October 2024
Cycle of Catechesis. The Spirit and the Bride. The Holy Spirit guides the people of God towards Jesus our hope. 10. “The Spirit, gift of God”. The Holy Spirit and the sacrament of marriage
A reading from the 1st letter of St. John (4:7-8)
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God and he who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever who does not love, does not know God for God is love.
God created man in his own image … male and female he created them”(Gen 1:27).
Dear brothers and sisters,
Last time we explained what we proclaim about the Holy Spirit in the Creed.
The reflection of the Church, however, did not stop at that brief profession of faith.
It continued, both in the East and in the West, by the work of the great Fathers and Doctors.
Today, in particular, we would like to gather a few crumbs of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit developed in the Latin tradition, to see how it enlightens all of Christian life and the sacrament of marriage in particular.
The main originator of this doctrine is Saint Augustine, who developed the doctrine on the Holy Spirit. He sets out from the revelation that “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8).
Now love presupposes one who loves, one who is beloved and love itself that unites them.
The Father is, in the Trinity, He who loves, the source and origin of everything;
the Son is He who is beloved, and
the Holy Spirit is the love that unites them. [see footnote 1 below]
The God of Christians is therefore a “sole” God, but not solitary;
His is a unity of communion and love.
Along these lines, some have proposed to call the Holy Spirit not the “third-person singular” of the Trinity, but rather the “first-person plural”.
In other words, He is the We, the divine We of the Father and the Son, the bond of unity between different persons, the very principle of the unity of the Church, which is indeed a “sole body” resulting from several persons.
The Holy Spirit and the family.
As I said, today I would like to reflect with you in particular on what the Holy Spirit has to say about the family. What can the Holy Spirit have to do with marriage, for example?
A great deal, perhaps the essential, and I will try to explain why!
Christian marriage is the sacrament of self-giving, one for the other, of man and woman.
This is how the Creator intended it when he “So God created man in his own image … male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27).
The human couple is therefore the first and most elementary realization of the communion of love that is the Trinity.
Married couples, too, should form a first-person plural, a “we”.
They stand before each other as “I” and “you”, and stand before the rest of the world, including the children, as “we”. How beautiful it is to hear a mother say to her children: “Your father and I…”, as Mary said to Jesus when they found him in the temple at the age of twelve, teaching the doctors (Luke 2:48), and to hear a father say: “Your mother and I”, as if they were one.
How much children need this unity – mother and father together – the unity of the parents, and how much they suffer when it is lacking! How much the children of separated parents suffer, how much they suffer.
But in order to respond to this vocation, marriage needs the support of the One who is the gift, who is the very Giver. Where the Holy Spirit enters, the capacity for self-giving is reborn.
Some Fathers of the Latin Church affirmed that the Holy Spirit, as a reciprocal gift of the Father and the Son in the Trinity, is also the reason for the joy that reigns between them, and they were not afraid, when speaking of it, to use the image of gestures proper to married life, such as the kiss and the embrace[see footnote 3 below]
No one is saying that such unity is an easy task, especially in today’s world; but this is the truth of things as the Creator designed them, and therefore it is in their nature. It may seem easier and quicker to build on sand than on rock, but Jesus tells us what the result is (Mt 7:24-27) 24 “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house upon the rock; 25 and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. 26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand; 27 and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell; and great was the fall of it.”).
In this case we do not even need the parable, because the consequences of marriages built on sand are there for all to see, and it is above all the children who pay the price.
Children suffer from the separation or lack of love of their parents!
With regard to so many couples, it is necessary to repeat what Mary said to Jesus at Cana in Galilee: “They have no wine” (Jn 2:3 – When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him: “They have no wine”).
The Holy Spirit is the one who continues, on a spiritual level, the miracle that Jesus performed on that occasion: transforming the water of habit into a new joy of being together.
This is not a pious illusion: it is what the Holy Spirit has done in so many marriages when the spouses have decided to call on Him.
It would not be a bad thing, therefore, if, in addition to the legal, psychological and moral information given in the preparation of engaged couples for marriage, we were to deepen this “spiritual” preparation, the Holy Spirit who creates unity.
An Italian proverb says: “Never put a finger between a man and a woman, never interfere”.
There is indeed a “finger” to put between the husband and the wife, the “finger of God”: that is, the Holy Spirit!
Footnotes:
[1] St. Augustine, De Trinitate, VIII,10,14
For even these, which are called our wilderness, are his gifts.
For that faith may work through love, the love of God is poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. And he was given when Jesus was glorified by the resurrection. For then he promised that he himself would send him, and he sent him; for then, as it was written and foretold of him, he ascended on high, and led captives captive, and gave gifts to men. These gifts are our deserts, through which we attain the chief good of immortal happiness.
The Apostle says, God commended his love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Much more, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him.
And he adds: For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.
Those whom he first calls sinners, he afterwards calls enemies of God; and those whom he first speaks of as justified by his blood, he afterwards speaks of as reconciled by the death of the Son of God; and those whom he first speaks of as saved from wrath by him, he afterwards speaks of as saved by his life.
Before this grace, then, we were not only sinners, but in such sins that we were enemies of God.
But the same apostle calls us above several times by two appellations, viz. sinners and enemies of God — one as if the most mild, the other plainly the most harsh — saying,
For if when we were yet weak, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.
Those whom he called weak, the same he called ungodly.
Weakness seems something slight; but sometimes it is such as to be called impiety.
Yet except it were weakness, it would not need a physician, who is in the Hebrew Jesus, in the Greek Σωτήρ, but in our speech Savior. And this word the Latin language had not previously but could have seeing that it could have it when it wanted it. And this foregoing sentence of the apostle, where he says, For when we were yet weak, in due time He died for the ungodly, coheres with those two following sentences; in the one of which he spoke of sinners, in the other of enemies of God, as though he referred each severally to each, viz. sinners to the weak, the enemies of God to the ungodly.
[3] St. Augustine, De Trinitate, VIII,10,14.
A certain writer, when he would briefly intimate the special attributes of each of the persons in the Trinity, tells us that Eternity is in the Father, form in the Image, use in the Gift.
And since he was a man of no mean authority in handling the Scriptures, and in the assertion of the faith, for it is Hilary who put this in his book (On the Trinity, ii.); I have searched into the hidden meaning of these words as far as I can, that is, of the Father, and the Image, and the Gift, of eternity, and of form, and of use.
And I do not think that he intended more by the word eternity, than that the Father has not a father from whom He is; but the Son is from the Father, so as to be, and so as to be co-eternal with Him.
For if an image perfectly fills the measure of that of which it is the image, then the image is made equal to that of which it is the image, not the latter to its own image. And in respect to this image he has named form,
I believe in account of the quality of beauty, where there is at once such great fitness, and prime equality, and prime likeness, differing in nothing, and unequal in no respect, and in no part unlike, but answering exactly to Him whose image it is: where there is prime and absolute life, to whom it is not one thing to live, and another to be, but the same thing to be and to live; and prime and absolute intellect, to whom it is not one thing to live, another to understand, but to understand is to live, and is to be, and all things are one: as though a perfect Word, John 1:1 to which nothing is wanting, and a certain skill of the omnipotent and wise God, full of all living, unchangeable sciences, and all one in it, as itself is one from one, with whom it is one.
Therein God knew all things which He made by it; and therefore, while times pass away and succeed, nothing passes away or succeeds to the knowledge of God.
For things which are created are not therefore known by God, because they have been made; and not rather have been therefore made, even although changeable, because they are known unchangeably by Him.
Therefore, that unspeakable conjunction of the Father and His image is not without fruition, without love, without joy.
Therefore that love, delight, felicity, or blessedness, if indeed it can be worthily expressed by any human word, is called by him, in short, Use; and is the Holy Spirit in the Trinity, not begotten, but the sweetness of the begetter and of the begotten, filling all creatures according to their capacity with abundant bountifulness and copiousness, that they may keep their proper order and rest satisfied in their proper place.
