Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
National Marriage Week, celebrated from February 7 to 14, is a welcome opportunity to recognize the profound importance of marriage and family life in our world and in our Church. As a celibate priest, I have come to know many married couples and have celebrated hundreds of weddings, learning to appreciate the beauty and goodness of marriage and family life. I agree with the words of a blessing in the Rite of Marriage: “Marriage is the one blessing not forfeited by original sin nor washed away in the flood” (Noah’s).
This year’s theme for National Marriage Week is: “Man and Woman He Created Them: Together with Purpose.” In a nation that is very confused about the meaning and purpose of marriage, our Church speaks with clarity and conviction about marriage’s basic role in uniting the two most distinct expressions of our human nature – male and female – and in highlighting their indispensable role in bringing forth new life.
We Catholics should rejoice that our Church holds up for all people to see the noble calling God gives to married couples. Our Church maintains that marriage is the union of a man and woman who pledge their life-long, faithful mutual love and support and are open to having and raising children. This is a high standard but, as a Protestant man preparing for marriage to a Catholic said to me years ago, “The world needs a standard to judge itself by.” Our Church gives the world that standard.
There are in reality only two sexes: God made them male and female [Genesis 1:27]. Science agrees. “Biological sex in humans is primarily determined by specific chromosomes:” two X chromosomes in one’s DNA indicate a female, one X and one Y chromosome indicate a male (Biology Insights, August 22, 2025). There are some complicating conditions, such as an additional X chromosome or only one with no Y chromosome. Still, in the vast majority of cases a person’s DNA will determine one’s sex as male or female. Human reproduction is based on having both sexes and is the biological reason for sexual relations between the sexes.
In speaking with an engaged couple, I always asked them: are you willing to have children? God says: Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it [Genesis 1: 28]. Notice that it is the openness to having children that is at issue, not the actual ability to have them. As long as a couple has the essential body parts, they can marry. And there is always hope. A friend and his wife wanted children but had none for seven years. They learned natural family planning not to avoid children but to discover when their fertile time was, and then they had three children.
I pray regularly for infertile couples and occasionally I get to move the couple’s names from the infertile list to the pregnant list. Remember that Abraham and Sara, whose story is told in the Book of Genesis, were both well advanced in years and yet God fulfilled His promise that they would have a child: Isaac was born, the son of the promise. The same was true for Zachariah and Elizabeth, an elderly childless couple who became the parents of John the Baptist. For those who can never have children naturally, it is a generous act to adopt children or find other ways to serve young people.
Some people today believe that members of the same sex can be married to one another, a view the US Supreme Court adopted in 2015. “You should be able to marry the one you love,” say same-sex advocates. Our Lord teaches us to love our neighbor, so would that allow for marriage to a person of your own sex? Not if you consider that the love Jesus teaches us to show to others is the willingness to do them good, not simply an affection or sexual feelings the other person provokes in us. He extends the commandment of love to include even our enemies, toward whom we would hardly feel affection or sexual attraction. Men can have genuine affection for other men and women for women. They can (and ought to) form strong friendships but that doesn’t constitute a basis for marriage.
Marriage is intimately and, I would argue, necessarily, tied to having and raising children. Even in the Stone Age, which lasted for 3.4 million years, ending between 4000 and 2000 BCE, anthropologists say “pair bonding” between a man and a woman existed [Stephanie Coontz, A History of Marriage, 2005]. That is not true for most animals, birds and some other primates excepted; but it is typical for humans to form male-female pairs. They have sexual relations and produce children.
Now, human children require a much longer time for their brains to develop and to learn language, social skills such as cooperation and moral values, and acquire cultural knowledge. Neuropsychologist Sam Goldstein says: “While most mammals become self-sufficient within months or a few years, humans require over a decade to achieve independence” (Psychology Today, May 21, 2025). I wager that most parents would not consider their ten-year-old son or daughter capable of living on their own. Dr. Goldstein adds that “emerging adulthood” now stretches well past biological maturity into the late 20’s. It simply takes human beings a very long time to be able to take care of themselves and direct their lives.
Children and adolescents need adults during this prolonged maturation process. Who are the best people to oversee and contribute to their development? The parents who brought them into the world. Others help, of course: grandparents, older children, day care workers, teachers, coaches and more; but the parents are the most important adults because of their natural ties to their children. Idealistic young Jewish couples in Israel living on kibbutzim (communal farms) in the 1950’s decided that each adult would take personal responsibility for raising all the children in the kibbutz, without preferring their own, only to have the experiment fail when children wanted more time with their own parents and parents increasingly felt the same. Nature won. Respecting nature, the Catholic Church teaches that parents are the primary educators of children in all things, including the faith.
The stable union of the parents in order to raise their children is, I believe, the historic origin of marriage. This makes marriage a distinctly heterosexual institution, for only the union of a man and a woman can produce a child. Members of the same sex can (and, in some cases, do) raise children but they cannot be their origin. This is why societies throughout history and all major religions, including our Catholic Church, have regarded marriage as uniquely the union of members of the two sexes.
So, if the stable union of parents is the necessary foundation of their children’s development, does their marriage lose its purpose after their children grow up? May they separate or divorce then? According to nature, I would argue, yes. But Jesus Christ teaches us differently: For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. So, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate [Mark 10:7-9].
The commandment of life-long marriage is a distinctive element of the “new way” of living and serving God that Jesus taught his disciples. Jewish law and pagan law allowed for divorce – in many cases, giving the right to initiate a divorce only to the men. But Jesus teaches us: Love your neighbor as yourself [Mark 12:31]. Marriage creates a unity that takes precedence over the duality of two persons. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The couple faces the challenge every day to love one another, preferring the good of one’s spouse to the good of oneself.
Such self-giving over a lifetime is only possible with God’s help – but He offers it in abundance, especially through the Sacrament of Matrimony, which two baptized Christians enjoy. Thus, grace builds on nature and perfects it. Jesus calls married couples beyond the natural limits of their state of life to a way of living their marriage that reflects the loving, faithful and fruitful union of Christ, the Bridegroom and his Bride, the Church. Happily married couples understand this instinctively and live it joyfully.
Because the joining of husband and wife makes them one flesh in a union that God has joined, they have a solemn responsibility to work out any difficulties that might threaten their union. St. Paul’s teaching, discussed by Pope Francis in his encyclical letter, Amoris Laetitia (the Joy of Love), applies in a special way to marriage: Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, it is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things [I Corinthians 13:4-7]. This kind of love never fails, says the Apostle. This is not an impossible dream, for there are many marriages which attain or come close to attaining this ideal. It certainly is worth the effort, for it produces something of great benefit to the couple.
What if a marriage fails? The question is: why? If one or both of the spouses did not live up to their promises and that caused the rupture in their relationship, then they should own their responsibility for what went wrong. But let them hear Jesus’ message: Repent and believe in the Gospel [Mark 1:15]. Being sincerely sorry for causing a marriage to fail will bring God’s forgiveness, while Christ’s Gospel assures the repentant sinner that he or she is still a beloved child of God. Even if the marriage cannot be repaired, the separated or divorced spouses can accept God’s grace and live in peace.
In my opinion, a large number of marriages fail for what we might call structural reasons: the edifice wasn’t strong enough to bear the weight of marital responsibilities and challenges. Our Church, exercising the power of the keys entrusted to it by the Lord [Matthew 18:18] and striving to be both merciful and just, has an annulment procedure to determine if a failed marriage was joined by God or not. Having worked on many annulment cases, I know that people can err in choosing a spouse (for example, a man inclined to be violent might hide that tendency until after the wedding; a woman might ignore her husband and only listen to her mother, which contradicts the “partnership of the whole of life” that a true marriage demands).
A decree of annulment does not mean there was nothing good in a marriage nor does it make children illegitimate (they were born in a marriage recognized in law by the state and, often, by the Church) but it does render an impartial judgment on the overall viability of a marriage. If judged invalid, the couple is free of that bond and may, if they choose, marry someone else with, one hopes, a better outcome.
Finally, regarding children, it is ironic that a society that firmly and rightly condemns child abuse is turning away from having children. It is a broad trend in today’s world with many countries, including our own, below the fertility rate needed, 2.1 children per woman, simply to maintain the population at its current level. We see with some frequency couples walking their dog instead of pushing a child in a baby carriage. I have had couples tell me, “We only want one child so we can give our child all our love.” I would ask them, “Have you thought about it from the child’s point of view? You will be gone some day and your child will have no brothers and sisters.” I urged them to understand that love is expansive; it reaches out to embrace others. This is different, of course, from the situation of a couple that, try as they might or faced with a serious impediment to having further children, are able only to have one.
If God wants married couples to be open to bringing forth new life, we must recognize that a couple may need to postpone having more children. The Catholic faith does not oppose this. It only asks two things, first, that the reasons for doing so be serious: the couple has a large number of children, a parent has significant health problems, the family does not have sufficient resources to care for more children – and second, that the means for limiting family size be appropriate: natural means rather than artificial ones.
The Church opposes artificial birth control because, in the couple’s fertile phase, it separates their sexual union’s unitive and procreative dimensions, which God joined together. Natural family planning methods respect the periodic appearance of both unitive and procreative aspects of the one act by counseling abstinence during the fertile phase. Contrary to what many think, modern natural planning methods are not based on averaging previous menstrual cycles but on real-time observations of the woman’s body. Does it always work? No – and neither do condoms, the pill or diaphragms. It takes some instruction, discipline and trust in God to abstain from sexual relations for a short time, but married couples should remember that some fellow Catholics – bishops, priests, religious sisters and brothers – are called by God to practice total abstinence. With God all things are possible [Matthew 19:26].
I end with a story. On a visit to Spain in 2013, I spent a weekend in Barcelona and, along with scores of other tourists, I visited a thirteenth-century Gothic church called Santa Maria del Mar on Saturday afternoon. Not surprisingly, a wedding was taking place. I noticed that people stopped walking around with their cameras, sat down and watched. Standing on an altar platform several steps above us, the young couple pronounced their vows and exchanged their rings. All of a sudden, an immense applause erupted from us tourists. We sensed that we had just witnessed something extraordinary: a man and a woman had pledged faithful love to one another for the rest of their lives and we were there to see it. The couple turned toward us and bowed graciously. I know I prayed for them and I would imagine many of the other tourists did as well. This is how a marriage among our people should begin: in God’s presence and with trust in His grace to sustain them to the end. God bless you, married couples! May the Lord, whose Son married our human race in the Incarnation, be the foundation and joy of your lives.
Sincerely in Christ,
+Mark E. Brennan
Bishop of Wheeling-Charleston