Part 5 of our stripped down look at Amoris Laetitia with some commentary by PopeWatch:
121. Marriage is the icon of God’s love for us.
122. Married couples do not have to reproduce perfectly the relationship of Christ and His Church. (Whew! That’s a relief!)
123. Conjugal love is the greatest form of friendship. (Too weak a term for what exists between spouses in a happy lengthy marriage.)
124. A love that is weak cannot sustain the commitment that marriage requires. (Basing a marriage all on love is always a mistake. PopeWatch has seen some marriages survive rough patches simply because both parties were fundamentally decent people, and adhered to what some would consider bromides such as “A deal’s a deal.”)
125. Marriage involves constant mutual respect.
126. The joy of love needs to be cultivated in marriage.
127. Tenderness is a sign of a love free of possessiveness.
128. Pope writes about lover’s gaze in marriage. (Parts of this Exhortation read like an old Dear Abby column from the Fifties.)
129. Joy of contemplative love needs to be cultivated in marriage.
130. Joy also grows in pain and sorrow. (The most profound, and utterly true, observation yet in the Exhortation.)
131. Marriage is better than shacking up.
132. Don’t marry in haste, but don’t wait forever either.
133. Please, thank you and sorry are important words in a marriage. (The Pope is certainly correct here, but is this really the type of subject to be covered in a papal document?)
134. Love grows in a good marriage.
135. Marriages should not be entered to with media created expectations of perfection and fantasy.
136. Dialogue is important in marriage, even though men and women communicate in different ways.
137. Quality time is important in marriage.
138. Make your spouse of the highest priority for you.
139. Keep an open mind in regard to the thoughts of your spouse.
140. Show affection and concern for your spouse.
141. Have something to say instead of boring chit chat.
142. A love lacking either pleasure or passion is insufficient to symbolize the union of the human heart with God.
143. Passions have an important place in married life.
144. Jesus showed emotions during his earthly life.
145. Emotions are neither good nor bad, but the actions we take in regard to such emotions can be good or bad.
146. Marital life strives to ensure that emotions benefit the family as a whole.
147. Renunciation as an antidote to a destructive hedonism within marriage.
148. Control of emotions and passions is important in a marriage.
149. Pleasures within marriage can find different expressions at different times in life.
150. Sex is a marvelous gift from God.
More on Monday.
I’ve known two marriages where one spouse cared for the other, dying from a wretched disease. I would have thought the care and loyalty shown by the healthy spouses to the dying ones is a higher form of friendship than conjugal love, but maybe I’m missing something. I may need to read the unabridged AL.
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Alas, I’m fairly certain Baptist minister Kevin A Thompson’s blog is more useful than our Pope’s exhortation.
One question no one ever asks: How many Catholics are ready and willing to shed their blood for “ambiguity?
My theology professor use to exclaim that “No one follows an uncertain trumpet.” Confusion is a weapon of the diabolical.
124 – depends on what you mean by love. Amoris probably would not cut it. Caritas or agape, on the other hand, can. If love = amoris = romantic attraction/attachment, good luck with that. If by love you mean a commitment to willing the true good of the other, than, yes, that is a sufficient basis for a marriage.
Dulce nuptias inexpertis.