The opportunities to officiate or preside at a wedding don't come along as often as I would like. It's not that we don't have a lot of Catholic weddings in these parts, it's more because we are blessed with a healthy number of Catholic Priests & Deacons in these neck of the woods.
I returned to my home parish of St. Jane's in Abita Springs to witness the sacramental marriage of Christopher and Courtney; a couple I have been preparing for the past six months. The preparation and the wedding, I'm happy to report, went off without a hitch. In fact I would say the wedding was downright beautiful.
This came at a good time for me, as an ordained Catholic minister, as so much has been in the news lately about marriage. We read of the decline of weddings in churches as more young people opt for the deal on a beach or the park or whatever. We read of the reported number of couples living together outside of marriage. And just recently we have been reading of the New York Senate's vote to affirm homosexual marriage.
Many people and dare I say many institutions, including religious ones, can declare or decide what marriage is I guess. What marriage is in the Catholic Church is the sacramental union of one man and one woman who are guided to give exclusively the gift of self to the other. So much so is this union sacramental that the Church declares that the actual ministers of this Sacrament are the bride and groom themselves. And in Catholic theology we understand that this Sacrament, like that of Holy Orders, is ordained to the salvation of others. Yes, in sacramental marriage the husband is charged with helping his wife along the way to the destination of eternal life with God in Heaven and the wife helping her husband to eternal life with God in Heaven.
And in our theology of sacramental marriage we openly discuss and encourage that the couple be aware of this gift of self and the gift of complementality as their marriage be always open to the gift of children.
As a church, we can acknowledge past failures in sharing the fullness of truth with the faithful. But in these days when the Church and the Sacrament of Marriage is under attack to the will of the world, we must be firm in guiding our young couples to embrace marriage as a gift from God, raised to the dignity of a Sacrament by Christ Himself!
I am thankful for Christopher and Courtney's gift to me of helping reaffirm the beauty of sacramental marriage last night.
And I trust that their marriage will be richly blessed and so too all of those in which Christ is placed first and foremost at the center of married life.
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