Meaning of sex: Consummate the marriage

		A Culture  of Life  Christopher West

Sexual intercourse is meant to participate in the very life and love of God. Sexual intercourse itself reveals (makes visible) something of the invisible mystery of God.

This, of course, does not mean that God is sexual. God is pure Spirit in which there's no place for the difference of the sexes. God's mystery remains infinitely beyond any human image or analogy. We must always keep this in mind when applying the analogy of sexual love lest we make the serious error of reducing the infinite God to our finite concepts.

That being said, the analogy of faithful, sexual love, while limited, helps us understand God's love in a particularly profound way. To love and be loved as God loves - this is the deepest desire of the human heart. God put it there when he made us in his image. Nothing else can satisfy. Nothing else will fulfill.

Words become flesh

This is what we embody as male and female. Sex is so beautiful, so wonderful, so glorious, that it's meant to express God's free, total, faithful, and fruitful love. Another name for this kind of love is marriage.

Yes - sex is meant to express wedding vows. It's where the words of the wedding vows become flesh. That's why sexual intercourse is called the marital embrace.

At the altar, bride and groom commit themselves to each other freely, totally, faithfully, and fruitfully until death - these are the canonical promises they make, the promises of fidelity, indissolubility, and openness to children. Then that night, and throughout their marriage, they enact their commitment. They express with their bodies what they expressed at the altar with their minds and hearts. In doing so, they consummate their marriage. That is, they complete it, perfect it, seal it, renew it.

'Image the love'

Spouses not only image the love of God within the Trinity; they also image the love between God and all humanity, made visible in the love of Christ and the Church. By virtue of their baptisms, the marriage of Christians is a sacrament. That means it's a living sign that truly communicates and participates in the union of Christ and the Church. The marriage vows lived out in the whole of married life and particularly in the spouses "one flesh" union constitute this living sign.

Paraphrasing St. Paul: For this reason a man will leave father and mother and cling to his bride, and the two shall become one flesh. This is a profound mystery, and it refers to Christ and the Church (see Eph 5:31-32). Christ left his Father in heaven. He left the home of his mother on earth - to give up his body for his Bride, so that we might become "one flesh" with him.

'Primordial sacrament'

Since the "one flesh" communion of man and wife foreshadowed the Eucharistic communion of Christ and the Church right from the beginning, John Paul II speaks of marriage as the "primordial sacrament."

Let's pause for a moment to let this reality sink in. Of all the ways that God chooses to reveal his life and love in the created world, John Paul II is saying, marriage - enacted and consummated by sexual union - is in a certain way the most fundamental. Christ, of course, is the fullest revelation of God's love in the world. Yet it's marriage - more than anything else - that prepares us to understand the love of Christ.

St. Paul wasn't kidding when he said this is a "profound mystery."

Christopher West is a research fellow and faculty member of the Theology of the Body Institute in West Chester, Pa. His column is syndicated by www.OneMoreSoul.com and reprinted from his book Good News About Sex and Marriage: Honest Questions and Answers About Catholic Teaching (St. Anthony Messenger Press).

Boston College: Commencement 'follies'

		The Catholic  Difference  George Weigel

Boston College's president, Jesuit Father William Leahy, is a man of no small dreams, having publicly declared his intention of leading Boston College (B.C.) to the position of world's premier Catholic university.

One has to admire Father Leahy's sense of purpose, which less charitable souls might even call chutzpah. Recent goings-on at B.C. suggest, however, that the university is more likely to become a Catholic imitation of politically correct Harvard than the greatest Catholic institution of higher education on Planet Earth.

Controversy over Rice

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice was invited to deliver the B.C. commencement address and to receive an honorary degree. Many B.C. students were thrilled; they admired her, and getting Dr. Rice to their commencement trumped that other Boston-area university, the one in Cambridge.

But Franciscan Father Kenneth Himes, the theology department chairman, and Jesuit Father David Hollenbach, who holds the Flatley Chair in Father Himes' department, were not thrilled. To the contrary, they were unhappy campers and organized a petition, signed by some 200 other B.C. folk, which objected to Rice's honorary degree.

Why? Because, they claimed, an article she had written in Foreign Affairs had argued a view of the role of national interest in U.S. foreign policy that was incompatible with the teaching of the Catholic Church. And because Dr. Rice had, in office, committed grave errors of "practical moral judgment" - meaning her role as National Security Advisor in the decision to go to war in Iraq.

As Fr. Paul McNellis, another Boston College Jesuit, usefully pointed out, Himes and Hollenbach misrepresented both Rice's concept of national interest and its place in the formulation of foreign policy, and the Church's settled moral teaching on international public life.

Just war arguments

As for Iraq, Himes and Hollenbach were playing politics in the guise of moral theology. For Fathers Himes and Hollenbach seemed to assume, as self-evidently true, that the U.S.-led action in Iraq did not meet the standards set by the just war tradition.

But that is not self-evidently true at all, as I tried to demonstrate in the April issue of First Things (www.firstthings.com). Serious just war analysts could and did have different prudential judgments about what should be done, in early 2003, about a genocidal maniac who, defying a dozen U.N. resolutions, was about to break out of "the box" of international sanctions and resume his quest for regional hegemony and weapons of mass destruction, and his support for international terrorism.

But to assert, as a moral given, that the action undertaken by the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq was unjustified is, as Father McNellis put it, a "political disagreement masquerading as a moral and theological dispute."

That, alas, is par for the course in today's American Catholic theological guild, in which Fathers Himes and Hollenbach are prominent members. Another member of the guild, Jesuit Father Drew Christiansen (now editor of America), has gone so far as to propose revising the Catechism of the Catholic Church to establish, not a parallel Magisterium of theologians, but a shadow government of theologians who would determine when the criteria for the morally justifiable use of armed force has been met. No small ambitions there, either.

'The Sixties are over'

I certainly don't wish to suggest that Father Leahy's hopes for Boston College are misplaced. Still, the B.C. commencement follies came in the wake of some other - shall we say - peculiarities in Golden Eagle-land.

Another member of the B.C. theology department, Jesuit Father John Paris, supported the campaign to euthanize Terry Schiavo. B.C. has also been home to efforts by prominent and wealthy Catholic laymen to reinvent Catholicism as Catholic Congregationalism, under the rubric of improved management practices.

There are great teachers and great students at Boston College. Unless Father Leahy gets his faculty to understand that the Sixties are over, however, his honorable ambitions are going to be, and should be, frustrated.

George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.