The First Blessing: Children

Marriage was instituted first of all for the due propagation of the human race.

Because propagation of any sort would satisfy neither the dignity of the parents, nor the education of the children, nor the interests of society.

Because it might be the work solely of animal passion, whereas man’s dignity requires in all his free actions intervention and even control by his superior or spiritual part.

Because it might leave paternity uncertain, it might be the fruit of transient unions, and it would then afford for the education of the children neither the security nor the continuity nor the unity which are needed.

Because the citizen is no better than the man of whom he is made; and a promiscuous propagation of mankind, by compromising the right formation of men, would expose society to the risk of being in want of that which it needs most, virtuous citizens who are devoted to their country.

by requiring in advance of the corporal union a First, sincere affection uniting the souls; secondly, by providing for education by means of the stability of the union; finally, by creating through the fusion of two persons a common principle of vigilance, tenderness and care, by which the children benefit from the qualities of both sexes harmoniously combined. “Man and woman together constitute the principle which is destined to transmit and develop human life.”¹

¹ Dermine, work cited, p. 44.

Such a death is an accidental misfortune. Sad though it be, it does not entirely destroy the unity in duality which was realized in the marriage. The surviving spouse is guided in his life and in his task of education by the remembrance of the lessons and counsels of the departed one, and by all that the deceased has left him. He knows the counsels and wishes of the deceased partner, and tries to conform to them; and thus the education of a legitimate child is never the work of one parent alone.

The Creator of the human race Himself [says the Encyclical] who in His goodness wished to use men as His

helpers in the propagation of life, taught this when, instituting marriage in Paradise, He said to our first parents, and through them to all future spouses, “Increase and multiply, and fill the earth,” as St. Augustine¹ admirably deduces from the words of the holy Apostle St. Paul to Timothy when he says, “The Apostle himself is therefore a witness that marriage is for the sake of generation: ‘I wish,’ he says, ‘young girls to marry.’ And, as if someone said to him, ‘Why?’ he immediately adds, ‘to beget children, to be mothers of families.’”² We prove it from the fact that the faculty of reproduction brings together intimately persons of different sexes; also because apart from this power of reproduction the institution of marriage would be inconceivable; because the right use of that power is a safeguard of the other blessings of marriage; and because the right propagation of mankind closely concerns the good of society as a whole.

¹ De bono conjugali, c. 24, n. 32; PL, 40, 394.

² Pp. 24-25.

Yes, a great blessing. In the first place what an honor it is for man to be associated with the creative work of God, to bring forth a king of visible creation, to prepare one of the elect for Heaven, to furnish to the Church a son, in whom, once he will have been regenerated by baptism, Jesus Christ will dwell! What happiness to survive, as it were, one’s self in the persons of dear ones who love you, and thus obtain even on earth a kind of perpetual memory! Besides, the child cements the union of the parents; in the little quarrels which are almost inevitable he is the conciliating element; because he requires good example he is an educative factor, and makes the work of mutual upbuilding easier for the parents. The sacrifices he demands are compensated for by satisfactions of a higher order; the cares he requires make him the more beloved. The human mind is unable to imagine or to taste this dignity, or to appreciate that feeling of pride in being the father or the mother of a child of men and a child of God. Even then they will not appreciate it when they see the look in the eyes of their child in whom shines the immortal soul; or when afterward they reflect that that soul is the breath of God, that the Son of God died for that child, that enriched as he is with the gift of sanctifying grace, he is more like a God than a man, that he is destined to live forever *De bono conjugali chapter 24. number 32, Latin Patrology. 40, 394. *Pp. 24-25.

and when, thereupon they exclaim: “This is my child! He owes his existence to me! Without me he would not be there, and would never come to be!”¹ If a true Christian mother weighs well these things, she will indeed understand with a sense of deep consolation that of her the words of Our Saviour were spoken: “A woman . . . when she hath brought forth the child remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world”; and proving herself superior to all the pains and cares and solicitudes of her maternal office with a more just and holy joy than that of the Roman matron, the mother of the Gracchi,² she will rejoice in the Lord, crowned as it were with the glory of her offspring. Both husband and wife, however, receiving these children with joy and gratitude from the hand of God, will regard them as a talent committed to their charge by God, not only to be employed for their own advantage or for that of an earthly commonwealth, but to be restored to God with interest on the day of reckoning.³ “Such,” says St. Augustine whom the Encyclical cites, “is the law of marriage, which sets off the glory of fecundity while it puts a brake to the shameful disorder of incontinence.”⁴

¹ Schilgen, work cited, p. 11.

² The Encyclical here recalls an event of Roman history. Whilst other matrons were displaying their jewels to their hearts’ content, the mother of the Gracchi presented her two sons, saying: “These are my jewels.”

³ P. 26.

⁴ De Gen. ad. lit., Book IX, chapter 7, number 12; Latin Patrology, 34, 397.

Not at all; it is completed only by the right education of the child. In giving them this little being who is entirely incapable of providing for himself, nature, in a general way, designates the parents as those who must provide for him: physically, by the mother’s milk and the means of subsistence; morally, by the education of the mind and heart which begins immediately and lasts continuously, thanks to the constant influence which the common life exerts on those who share it. The parents have an inviolable right to fulfil this mission of education with which nature has entrusted them, and in view of which they have been instilled with a love which nothing can replace.

Since this twofold duty entrusted to the parents for the good of their children is of such high dignity and of such great importance, every use of the faculty given by God for the procreation of new life is the right and the privilege of the marriage state alone, by the law of God and of nature, and must be confined absolutely within the sacred limits of that state.¹ Certainly, outside of marriage, education is deprived of the double guaranty which a lawful union provides: the guaranty of its duration by the perpetual bond which attaches the parents to each other; the guaranty of prudence by the intimacy which gives to education the resource of a common principle rich with the complementary qualities of both sexes.

¹ P. 27.