Strength for the WeekPauline Books and Media The Wonder of God’s Love

It goes without saying that married life can be a serious challenge: living with another, flawed human being for a lifetime cannot be otherwise. But the solution is not to throw up our hands over our disappointments and problems with our spouses. The solution is to enter more deeply into relationship with them, to prayerfully work out our problems together, and to grow in love and fidelity, mutual respect and forbearance. The sacrament of Matrimony offers Catholic spouses special graces to do so.
We can manage the differences between husbands and wives by enhancing their cooperation. For the woman of modest means, lifelong cooperation between herself and one husband enhances her wealth, health, and happiness, as well as dramatically improving the life-chances of her children. For the educated woman, following a different career path from her husband can become an opportunity for both of them, rather than a liability. The protections of marriage enable both spouses to reach their individual and shared potential through specialization and mutual support.
The best way to ensure that husbands and wives cooperate with each other over the course of their lifetimes is to foster the stability of a social institution that creates a set of mutual rights and responsibilities. That social institution should have legal recognition and protection, so that at least the most basic of those rights and responsibilities are legally enforceable, and not so easily evaded when times get tough. That social institution should also be supported by the culture because of the positive good it offers both parents and children.
That social institution, of course, is marriage. It is the distinctively Catholic vision of marriage: the lifelong, sexually exclusive union of one man and one woman, established by the consent of the spouses, characterized by love and a common life, ordered to the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of children.
Women deeply desire a new way of understanding their role in society and of living out their lives as wives, mothers, and workers. Marriage isn’t the problem for women. Marriage is the solution.



This week's Strength for the Week excerpted from Women, Sex and the Church which we are pleased to offer at a 20% discount online this week.