In Philosophies at War, Archbishop Fulton Sheen addresses the American people on the poisons of modern culture. Read on for Sheen’s writing about the attacks on the family and marriage, and how Catholics can rightly order their marital vocation.
Culture of Death
The Christian order demands the restoration of those areas of life which are life-growing, life-sustaining, and life-forwarding, viz.: the family. As from the impoverishment of cells in the body there flows the tragedy of death, so from the disintegration of the family there springs and spreads the dry-rot of the body-politic, the nation and the world. As the family is the school of sacrifice wherein we first learn to bear each other’s burdens, so the decay of the family is the unlearning of those sacrifices which bring on the decay of a nation as it faces the miseries and horrors of life.
The Attack on the Family
That the family is disintegrating in our national life, no one will deny. The modern husband and wife, like isolated atoms, resent the suggestion that they should lose their identity in the family molecule. It is each for himself as against all for one and one for all. And when there is an offspring, never before have children been so distant and so separated from their parents. The family hardly ever meets. The family that once had permanent headquarters, now has none, as the mother assumes she contributes more to the nation by making bullets than by raising babies.
About the only time the family meets is after midnight, when the home becomes a hotel, and the more money they have the less they meet. Less time is passed together than is spent at a motion picture, or a beauty parlour. Courtship takes place outside the home, generally in a crowded room with a low ceiling, amidst suffocating smoke, while listening to a tom-tom orchestra glamoured by a girl who invariably cannot sing.
The wife listens to radio serials with their moans, groans and commercials, wherein triangles are more common than in a geometry book. She reads magazine articles by women who never stay at home, saying that a woman’s place is in the home. The family Bible recording dates of birth and baptism is no longer existent because few read the Bible, few give birth, and few are ever baptised. And as for Catholics there is hardly a Catholic man or woman in the United States today over fifty years of age who cannot remember that in the days of his or her youth the rosary was said every evening in the family circle and everyone was there. How many do it now?
Divorce and Contraception
The two most evident symptoms of the breakdown of the family are: divorce and voluntary or deliberate sterility, i.e. broken contracts and frustrated loves.
Divorce destroys the stability of the family; voluntary sterility destroys its continuity. Divorce makes the right of living souls hang up the caprice of the senses and the terminable pact of selfish fancy; while voluntary sterility makes a covenant with death, extracting from love its most ephemeral gift while disclaiming all its responsibilities. It is a great conspiracy against life in which science, which should minister to life, is used as it is in war—to frustrate and destroy; it is a selfishness which is directed neither to saving nor to earning, but only to spending; it is an egotism, which because it admits of no self-control, seeks to control even the gifts of God; it sees sex not as something to solder life, but to scorch the flesh; it is a denial that life is a loan from the great bank of life and must be paid back again with the interest of life, and not with death.
The Beauty of Marriage
Marriage, naturally and supernaturally, is one, unbreakable unto death: Naturally, because there are only two words in the vocabulary of love: “You” and “Always.” “You,” because love is unique; “Always,” because love is eternal. Supernaturally, because the union of husband and wife is modeled upon the union of Christ and His Church, which endures through the agelessness of eternity.
The foundation of marriage is love, not sex. Sex is physiological and of the body: love is spiritual and therefore of the will. Since the contract is rooted not in the emotions, but in the will, it follows that when the emotion ceases, the contract is not dissolvable, for the love of the will is not subject to the vicissitudes of passion. A lifetime is not too long for two beings to become acquainted with each other, for marriage should be a series of perpetual and successive revelations, the sounding of new depths, and the manifestation of new mysteries.
At one time, it is the mystery of the other’s incompleteness which can be known but once, because capable of being completed but once; at another time, the mystery is of the other’s mind; at another the mystery is of fatherhood and motherhood which before never existed; and finally there is mystery of being shepherds for little sheep ushering them into the Christ Who is the door of the sheepfold.
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This article is taken from a chapter in Philosophies at War by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen which is available from TAN Books.
