The Campaign Against Conjugal Fidelity

After calling attention to the fact that every attack upon the child is equally an attack upon conjugal fidelity, because such a sin always compromises the primary end of marriage, the Encyclical mentions three special assaults which are launched respectively against conjugal chastity, against the

hierarchy of the family, and against the love which should be the ruling power in the home.

It is impaired by those friendly unions or “companionate marriages” which we have already characterized above (Number 86); also by that worldly point of view which, because of the exuberance of certain appetites, regards the uprightness of virtuous married people as out of date, demands greater license in relations with third parties, and the abolition of the legal barriers that still exist against adultery.

He appeals to the hearts of chaste couples; he invokes the immutable Divine prohibition: “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and the unalterable declaration of Christ: “Whosoever shall look on a woman to lust after her, hath already committed adultery with her in his heart” (St. Matth. v, 28).¹

¹ P. 43.

The theory which holds that the married woman should be freed from all subordination, and put on a footing of perfect equality with her husband. There is a propaganda for a physiological emancipation which would withdraw the wife from the duties of a spouse and mother; an economic emancipation, which would assure her full liberty of movement enabling her to administer her property and her affairs as she pleases; and a social emancipation, which would free her from domestic duties and enable her to throw herself according to her natural bent into politics or business.

This total emancipation is rejected¹ as an upsetting of the entire domestic order, and a cheapening of woman herself, who, robbed of her glory of spouse and mother, would become once more what she was in the pagan world, a mere instrument of the passions of her husband. This so-called “emancipated” woman, now neither a virgin nor a mother, on whom the modern world thinks it is conferring freedom by enabling her to “live no longer for others but for herself, that is, for her pleasure and according to her whims,”

under the influence of concupiscences, the only rights now recognized, undergoes “the brutal domination of him who has received from nature the gift of strength, over her whose weakness will henceforth be defenseless, since she will no longer have the protection of the Christian laws of marriage.”² For that matter, what serious historian does not acknowledge that woman owes her dignity and her true liberty to the Gospel of Christ? Absolute equality is rejected because the interests of the family, the duties of married life, the unity and stability of the institution of marriage demand a certain inequality of rank. But the Sovereign Pontiff has made the necessary or fitting reservations beforehand especially where he recognizes the equal right of both parties to the marriage, to demand of the other the acts that are proper to married life. (See Number 55, above.)

¹ P. 44.

² Abbé Dermine, La Doctrine du mariage chrétien, pp. 81, 82. Here is a confirmation which is not without value, as it comes from a Paris organ of wide circulation, which is not Catholic in its tone. Under the title, Mon Film, the magazine, Le Journal, under date of Jan. 16, 1931, published this frank admission: “Free love, the equality of the sexes, the personal struggle for life—these things are contrary to woman’s deepest instincts, to her moral and physical nature, to her true interests; they are but a last resort in a society where woman, falling from her high position—for she is falling from it in spite of appearances—is in danger of becoming more and more unhappy.”

Not at all; it can and should adapt itself to varying circumstances. Thus no one objects to the abolition of certain legal disabilities of women regarding contracts. But these variations can never change essentially the order established by God.¹

¹ P. 45.

The Encyclical does not touch upon these points in any way. It disapproves only such an injection of woman into public life as would imply her desertion of the home.

For the love which is engrafted upon a sacred duty and which persists through trials and difficulties, there is an attempt

to substitute an insecure and capricious affection and to make the constancy or inconstancy of that sentiment the norm which shall determine the continuance or breaking off of the marital union itself.

He calls it an attempt to substitute a house built upon sand for one that is built on a rock.¹

¹ P. 45.

We must take account of the actual condition of the human race since the Fall of our First Parents. It is, as a matter of fact, impossible to count on any perseverance which is not safeguarded by an obligation. The experience of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries proves conclusively that liberty alone does not lead to welfare and happiness.