Matrimony

Christian spouses receive special gifts suited to their state in life. This matrimonial grace perfects the couple's love and strengthens their indissoluble unity.

It enables them to help one another attain holiness in their married life and in the welcoming and education of their children.

Christ is the source of this grace. He encounters Christian spouses through matrimony, dwelling with them, granting them strength to carry their crosses.

He enables them to love one another with supernatural, tender, and fruitful love, and gives them the ability to reconcile after failures and to forgive one another.

Marriage is ordered to the procreation and education of children, in whom it finds its crowning glory.

Conjugal fruitfulness extends beyond physical parenthood to embrace the moral, spiritual, and supernatural life that parents transmit through the education of their children.

The Christian family is rightly called the Ecclesia domestica, a church in miniature. Within the home, parents are the first heralds of the faith, nurturing each child's vocation by word and example.

The family becomes the first school of Christian life and a school for human enrichment, where all learn perseverance, the joy of work, fraternal love, generous forgiveness, and above all, divine worship through prayer and self-offering.

Conjugal love demands inviolable fidelity as a consequence of the mutual self-gift between husband and wife. Love seeks to be definitive; it cannot be an arrangement until further notice.

This fidelity is grounded in God's own covenant faithfulness and in Christ's commitment to his Church.

From a valid marriage arises a bond between the spouses which by its very nature is perpetual and exclusive.

Established by God himself, this bond cannot be dissolved when concluded and consummated between baptised persons. The Church has no authority to contravene this divine arrangement.