A Catholic Mom in Hawaii: On Christian Marriage

Thursday, August 14, 2008

On Christian Marriage - The Hierarchy of the Family

How are husbands to love their wives?
Husbands, love your wives as Christ also loved the Church. (Paragraph 23 - Quoting the Bible)

What is the hierarchy of the family?
This order includes both the primacy of the husband in regard to the wife and children, the ready subjection of the wife and her willing obedience, which the Apostle commends in these words: "Let women be subject to their husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife, and Christ is the head of the Church." (Paragraph 26)

The man is the ruler of the family, and the head of the woman; but because she is flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone, let her be subject and obedient to the man.....(Paragraph 29 - Quoting Pope Leo XIII)

Is the wife then the slave of her husband?
.....not as a servant but as a companion, so that nothing be lacking of honor or of dignity in the obedience which she pays. Let divine charity be the constant guide of their mutual relations, both in him who rules and in her who obeys, since each bears the image, the one of Christ, the other of the Church. (Paragraph 29 - continued from previous quote of Pope Leo XIII)

But is not this subjection of the wife to her husband against her human dignity?

The same false teachers who try to dim the luster of conjugal faith and purity do not scruple to do away with the honorable and trusting obedience which the woman owes to the man. Many of them even go further and assert that such a subjection of one party to the other is unworthy of human dignity.....(the false teachers say) the woman is to be freed at her own good pleasure from the burdensome duties properly belonging to a wife as companion and mother.....

This, however, is not the true emancipation of woman, nor that rational and exalted liberty which belongs to the noble office of a Christian woman and wife; it is rather the debasing of the womanly character and the dignity of motherhood, and indeed of the whole family, as a result of which the husband suffers the loss of his wife, the children of their mother, and the home and the whole family of an ever watchful guardian. More than this, this false liberty and unnatural equality with the husband is to the detriment of the woman herself, for if the woman descends from her truly regal throne to which she has been raised within the walls of the home by means of the Gospel, she will soon be reduced to the old state of slavery (if not in appearance, certainly in reality) and become as amongst the pagans the mere instrument of man.

This equality of rights which is so much exaggerated and distorted, must indeed be recognized in those rights which belong to the dignity of the human soul and which are proper to the marriage contract and inseparably bound up with wedlock. In such things undoubtedly both parties enjoy the same rights and are bound by the same obligations; in other things there must be a certain inequality and due accommodation, which is demanded by the good of the family and the right ordering and unity and stability of home life. (Paragraphs 74-76)