In the vocation to marriage, men and women learn to love each other like God loves us, in a way that is passionate, self-sacrificing, and creative. Through Marriage, especially but not exclusively as parents, men and women model their entire lives on God by becoming fruitful and participating in God’s gift of creation, especially as the human parents of God’s children. Marriage is a natural institution created by God at the beginning of creation for the good of men and women, however, our Savior takes this good vocation and turns it into something great making it into a sacrament through which the very life of God flows into the world.
When two baptized Christians enter into marriage freely, making a lifelong commitment to grow in holiness together, we believe that their marriage becomes more than just the joining of two people in a contract, but a symbol of the new covenant between Christ and the Church and a chosen font of God’s grace which flows into the world through the share life of the married couple. In fact, the result of marriage, the family, has been called the domestic Church because it is really in the family that the life and mission of the Church begins. Marriage is a vocation, a calling from God, and therefore should not be entered into lightly and without considerable prayer and discernment. Sacramental Marriage is difficult, in fact almost impossible, without the presence of Christ at the center of the family. Like all vocations when lived well God promises that it will lead to our sanctification, holiness, and happiness.
