Second Task of Marriage

John Coppola 4/26/00 THL 467 The Second Task of Marriage The following essay will attempt to explain in detail what exactly the second task of marriage entails. Procreation as a task of marriage seems to be a fairly simple and straight forward one at first, but to fully understand it, one must have a deep understanding of the Catholic notion of love, sexuality, embodiment, and other moral norms relevant to various aspects of this task of marriage. With regard to love, a married couple with the desire to have children of their own must have a certain type of unconditional love for each other before they are truly ready to have children. When talking about sexuality, a couple must have an understanding of Catholic beliefs about sexuality which deal with the meaning of sexuality and the practices of sexuality considered acceptable and unacceptable by the Church. The topic of embodiment is a very broad one, and it is relevant to almost every aspect of marriage because it has to do with the idea that all humans are embodied in the image of God. The following essay will cover, in more detail, each of these ideas in order to show how important each is to the Catholic belief about the second task of marriage. It has already been stated that the second task of marriage is service to life through the action of procreation and education. Love plays a very important role in accomplishing this task both in the way that it is needed for procreation and the proper upbringing of children. Within marriage, a certain kind of love must exist for the second task of procreation to be carried out properly. First of all, there is romantic love that can come in the form of lust, infatuation, and sentimental love. Romantic love is an important component to the relationship of a married couple, but romantic love alone is an insufficient base on which to build a strong marriage. The kind of love that is needed to create a strong, stable marriage is responsible, unconditional love called agopic love. Agopic love is a kind of intangible love that can only be gained by being with another person for a good amount of time and truly getting to know everything about them while maintaining your love for them. What is meant by truly knowing the other person is that both individuals within a relationship know and understand the great, the good, the fair, and the faulty things about each other to the point that no personality traits of each other go unrevealed. This kind of mutual love can bring a couple so close to each other that an unbreakable bond is created. The strength of agopic love is such that a couple would never consider separating, and herein lies the reason why agopic love is so important for carrying out the second task of marriage. It is the Catholic view that before a couple decides to have children they need to come to a mutual understanding that they will do everything in their power to raise their children the best they can in accordance with Church teaching. This includes life long unconditional love of children and each other, because, without love the family cannot live, grow, and perfect itself as a community of persons (FC 32). Pope John Paul II puts it best in Familiaris Consortio when he says, the family has the mission to guard, reveal and communicate love, and this is a living reflection of and a real sharing in God's love for humanity and the love of Christ the Lord for the Church His bride (FC 31). Agopic love is the only type of love comparable to God's divine love of all human beings, and it is a prerequisite for the proper accomplishment of service to life through procreation and education. The Catholic understanding of sexuality is another important factor that a married couple must be fully aware of before attempting to carry out the second task of marriage. The importance of sexuality relates mostly to the act of procreation. The act of sex, or conjugal love is regarded in Church teaching as very sacred. Conjugal communion constitutes the foundation on which is built the broader communion of the family… (FC 36). With that in mind, virginity or celibacy has its own significance as the opposite of conjugal love. Pope John Paul II states that, virginity or celibacy keeps alive in the Church a consciousness of the mystery of marriage and defends it from any reduction and impoverishment (FC 29). In other words, conjugal love is one factor that makes marriage so special and separates it from the unmarried relationship. To participate in premarital sex is to take away from the value or mystery of marriage. In his apostolic exhortation, John Paul II says that conjugal communion for the sake of procreation is based on the complementarity that exists between man and woman. The concept of complementarity basically says men and women are equally created in the image of God and are equally embodied images of God. The physical,