A ‘One Flesh’ Sacramental Union

Image: Wedding day: Emilia and Karol Wojtyła Sr., 1906

Eduardo Echeverria on marriage: it requires sexual difference – in the sexual act – as a foundational prerequisite, indeed, as intrinsic to a one flesh-union of man and woman.

St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and even Pope Francis – every one of these popes – affirms the moral and sacramental significance of the two-in-one-flesh bodily unity as foundational to the marital form of love. But it is precisely the embodiment of human persons, as man and woman, which has been lost in our culture, even among Catholics, for a proper understanding of marriage.

The unity attained in becoming “two-in-one-flesh” in marriage is grounded in the order of creation (Gen 1:27; 2:24), persists through the regime of sin, and it is affirmed and simultaneously renewed through the redemptive sacrament of marriage. I developed this point in an earlier column. But now I want to underscore that real bodily oneness, a one-flesh union between a man and a woman, actualizes marital unity.

Agreeing with Pope Francis’s critique of “gender ideology,” Cardinal Gerhard Müller, head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, recently stated that gender ideology claims, “that man’s identity does not depend on nature, with a body that is limited to a masculine or feminine sexuality.” He adds, “There is an evident dualism behind all this: the body loses its significance vis-à-vis its own identity.” (The Cardinal Müller Report)

Contrary to this anthropological dualism, the Catholic tradition affirms that the body is intrinsic to selfhood, the human person is, bodily. This affirmation is rooted in the Church’s teaching on the soul/body unity of the human person. (Catechism of the Catholic Church 362-368) As John Paul says, “In fact, body and soul are inseparable: in the willing agent and in the deliberate act they stand or fall together.” (Veritatis Splendor 49) Therefore, we can easily understand why separating “the moral act from the bodily dimensions of its exercise is contrary to the teaching of Scripture and Tradition.”

This teaching is explicitly embraced by Benedict XVI (e.g., Address to the Roman Curia, December 21, 2012) and by Pope Francis (particularly in Amoris Laetitia 56, 74-75 and Laudato Si’ 155).

Click here to read the rest of Professor Echeverria’s column . . .

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