Question Three: On Mutual Love and Help

971. Mutual love and help is a necessary condition and foundation of conjugal life. So intimate and individual a custom of life, which is perfected in rendering the conjugal debt to one another and is completed by the partnership of roof and bed, so that spouses adhere to each other to the exclusion of another person, is not understood, we said, nor can it firmly stand, without an intimate union of souls strengthened by constant love, and without mutual help to be furnished to each other in the various necessities of domestic life. And indeed:

1° Nature inclines to this love, which moves to matrimony and to mutual love of man and woman, so that under its influence they may be a support and help to each other; marital copula fosters and nourishes this love, and common offspring promotes and strengthens it.

2° Christian doctrine commands love: "Husbands," says the Apostle, Eph. V, 25, 28, "love your wives, as Christ also loved the Church, and delivered himself up for her... So also husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself"; and similarly he wills that women "love their husbands, love their children; be prudent, chaste, sober, having care of the house, kind, subject to their husbands," Tit. II, 4-5.

3° Reason also confirms it: for where there is a special conjunction, there ought to be a special love. Between husband and wife there is an altogether special and most intimate conjunction in conjugal life, so that they are even one flesh. Therefore between them there ought to be an altogether special and intimate love; from which mutual support and help is naturally born to follow, because true love is naturally operative.

To true and intimate conjugal love there is opposed:

a) love, as it is called, platonic, nourished toward an unmarried person of the different sex; by which the spouse withdraws his heart from the other spouse so as to give it to an outside person, while nevertheless leaving the body to the spouse for conjugal acts;

b) a fortiori adulterous friendship, which would admit a lustful affection or act with outside persons; to which they say indulgence must be given in our days, since they judge affection restricted to the spouse to be "a certain obsolete weakness of mind and soul, or an abject and vile jealousy," and "this the more because not a few have an innate sexual disposition to which they cannot give satisfaction within the narrow limits of monogamous marriage," as Pius XI denounces;

c) likewise blind agreement of character and mere sympathy of disposition, which certain moderns intend to substitute as the foundation of marriage for genuine conjugal love, or for the deliberate and constant conjunction of souls and mutual charity, and "when this ceases, they teach that the bond by which alone souls are united is relaxed and fully dissolved";

d) finally conjugal jealousy, which can arise not only from the imprudence or fault of the other spouse, but also from the mere suspicion of the jealous one, and consists in this, that everywhere and in all actions of the other party he perceives signs of diminished love toward himself and undue love toward another person. For this defect the best remedy, says Prummer, Th. M. III, n. 688, "is the candid and open manner of speaking and acting always employed between spouses, without all ambiguities and secrets. As a rule to be recommended: Each spouse in his private life should hide nothing from the other party." This indeed, the praised author warns, is not to be extended to one's professional life and to secrets committed to one.

972. Respective offices of husband and wife. - Every love ought to be ordered; but in conjugal love there ought to be an order of subordination, because the husband is loved by the woman as her head, and the woman by the husband not as a slave or handmaid but as a companion and friend. Hence the Apostle says, Eph. V, 22-23: Let women be subject to their husbands as to the Lord; because the husband is the head of the woman, as Christ is the head of the Church (likewise I Pet. III, 1; I Cor. XI; Col. III, 18; I Tim. II, 12; Tit. II, 5); as he also adds: Husbands, love your wives as Christ also loved the Church, which he chose for himself, namely as a companion. Hence, although husband and wife are equal in right as to those things which are proper to the human person in order, namely, to his ultimate end, and as to the primary object itself of the matrimonial contract, or the conjugal debt, nevertheless they are by no means equal, but unequal, as to those things which concern domestic life.

And therefore the offices of the husband are one thing, those of the woman another.

A. The husband is the head of the woman and of the family, and therefore he ought

1° to protect the woman,

2° to provide suitable support to her according to his state,

3° to direct and govern her, not however as a slave, but as a companion and friend, and therefore to see to it that she fulfills her duties and to correct her when she fails, moderately, however, and according to her dignity,

4° diligently to administer the temporal goods of the family.

B. The woman is the companion of the husband, but subject to him as to the head, and therefore she ought

1° to show reverence to him as to head and ruler,

2° to furnish obedience in the governance of the house and in good morals,

3° diligently to care for the domestic matter.

Against these respectively they can sin by various offenses, as we noted II, n. 831-832.

But as Pius XI warns, that subordination:

1. does not deny nor take away the liberty which belongs to the woman by full right, whether because of the excellence of the human person, especially in order to her ultimate end, or in the primary office itself of marriage, in which two things she is equal to the man, or also because of the other most noble duties of wife, mother, and companion, which certainly cannot be abrogated by the husband, although they are to be exercised under his rule, with due subordination to him;

2. consequently, neither does it bid the woman to comply with any desires whatever of the husband, perhaps less consonant with reason or with the dignity of the wife herself;

3. nor finally does it teach that the wife is to be equated with persons who in law are called minors, to whom the free exercise of their rights is not usually conceded.

But it forbids an exaggerated license or equality, which is opposed to the essential order of domestic society with the greatest detriment of the whole family and proximate danger of ruin.

Now many moderns prattle that this subordination is "an unworthy servitude of one spouse toward the other; that all rights are equal between the spouses; and since these are violated by the servitude of one, they most proudly proclaim that a certain emancipation of woman must be carried out... But they establish this as threefold... and call it social, economic, and physiological: physiological indeed, insofar as they wish women to be freed or to be freed from the burdens of wife, whether conjugal or maternal, according to their free will...; economic, insofar as they wish the woman, even without the husband's knowledge and with him resisting, to be able freely to conduct and administer her own affairs for herself, children, husband, and the whole family being set aside; finally social, insofar as they remove from the wife the domestic cares either of children or of the family, so that, these being neglected, she may indulge her own talent and be devoted to affairs and offices even public.

But neither is this the true emancipation of woman nor that liberty consonant with reason...; rather it is the corruption of the womanly character and maternal dignity and the perversion of the whole family, by which the husband is deprived of wife, the offspring of mother, the house and whole family of an ever-watchful guardian. Indeed this false liberty and unnatural equality with the man turns to the ruin of the woman herself; for if the woman descends from that royal seat to which through the Gospel she has been raised within the domestic walls, she will shortly be reduced into the old servitude, if not in appearance, yet in true reality, as she was among the pagans, a mere instrument of the man."

And although this subordination of the woman can be varied according to various conditions of persons, places, and times, and although the social and economic conditions of the married woman, because of changed modes and usages of human intercourse, must in some way be changed and the civil rights of the wife adapted to the necessities of this time, indeed nor does it always seem to be reproved that a woman should apply herself in some measure even to public affairs: nevertheless, with account taken of those things which the diverse natural character of the feminine sex and the common good of the family require, and "provided the essential order of domestic society remains intact, which was founded by an authority and wisdom higher than human, that is, divine, and cannot be changed either by public laws or by private good pleasure": "the very structure of the family and its chief law, established and confirmed by God, it is never and nowhere lawful to overturn or touch."

973. Observation. - We have spoken of the obligations of spouses, insofar as they are formally spouses, which therefore arise immediately and of themselves from matrimony itself. Other obligations can belong to them toward offspring, insofar as they are parents, or toward other domestics, insofar as they have care of the house, concerning which it was said where we treated the virtue of piety, II, n. 824 and following.

974. The perfection of love in Christian marriage is fulfilled, in which, says Pius XI, the primacy of nobility belongs to divine charity, namely:

"The faith of matrimony requires that husband and wife be joined by a certain singular, holy, and pure love; and not that they love each other as adulterers, but as Christ loved the Church: for the Apostle prescribed this rule, when he says: Husbands, love your wives as Christ also loved the Church, which certainly he embraced with that immense charity, not for the sake of his own advantage, but proposing to himself only the benefit of the bride. Therefore we mean charity, not one founded only upon a carnal and quickly vanishing inclination, nor in flattering words alone, but also placed in the intimate affection and, since the proof of love is the showing of work, confirmed by outward work. But this work in domestic society not only comprises mutual aid, but also must extend to this, indeed must intend this especially, that the spouses help each other toward the inner man being more fully formed and perfected day by day; so that by the mutual partnership of life they may progress day by day more and more in the virtues, and especially may grow in true charity toward God and neighbor, on which finally the whole Law and the Prophets depend. Namely, the most absolute exemplar of all holiness proposed by God to men, which is Christ the Lord, all, of whatever condition they are and whatever honorable manner of life they have entered, can and must imitate, and, with God helping, can arrive even at the summit of Christian perfection, as is proved by the examples of many saints.

"This mutual interior formation of spouses, this constant striving to perfect each other, can in a certain very true sense, as the Roman Catechism teaches, also be called the primary cause and reason of matrimony, if nevertheless matrimony is taken not more strictly as an institution for rightly procreating and educating offspring, but more broadly as the communion, custom, and society of the whole of life."

Therefore love truly holds, in Christian matrimony, the primacy of nobility, not indeed by reason of the end, as if it were the primary end of marriage, as certain persons have erroneously interpreted, thence concluding that copula is licitly exercised for fostering love, although conception itself is impeded; - but because it is the primary cause impelling to matrimony, and the reason from which it can obtain its chief excellence and its whole signification.

Nor is this to be understood of the carnal love of pleasure, so that marriage would not be, as someone said, except a certain honorable covering of luxury; but of the noble love of affection, of the true devotion of spouses toward one another, and of proper self-denial.

This the children of Christian parents, as many as they are, could themselves experience: with how great devotion and charity parents love each other and their children, and how much, by the mutual exercise of virtues and the fulfillment of offices, in the midst of difficulties and burdens, they are able to perfect themselves. Thus, with divine grace helping, Christian marriage has become a true school of holiness and of eminent perfection, and has been able to raise them to greater things, indeed to the exercise of heroic virtue.