From the moment Christ uttered His stunning doctrine on marriage 2,000 years ago, the Church has stood in unbroken witness to His teaching. Christ elevated marriage to a sacrament of the New Law, linking it with the purity of God’s original design for creation. Through the history of Christianity, the Church has met challenge after challenge regarding this belief. Against the Romans she mandated that people from any social class could marry. Against pagan denigration of women, she demanded full and free consent from both parties. Adultery was held as equally sinful for men as for women. Concubinage was forbidden, polygamy condemned. Contraception and abortion were anathematized. At the same, the Church defended marriage, procreation, and the goodness of human sexuality, particularly underscoring the value and genius of both genders in a complementary relationship. Generation after generation she handed on to her children a pure, if hard, teaching.
Yet the Church persevered, calling the majority of her sons and daughters to holiness through family life. In particular, the Church had to struggle against the aberration of divorce. Practiced among the ancients — even among God’s chosen people — Christ’s assertion sounded like a thunderclap: “From the beginning it was not so!” Faced with challenges on all sides the Church endured. She maintained it was impossible to dissolve a valid, consummated marriage. Against kings and princes the Church repeatedly stood, suffering greatly but always emerging with her doctrine intact.
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