The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing so-called “same-sex marriage” has raised many questions. The institution of marriage has been around since the beginning of time. When the highest court in the land, prompted by the efforts of the president and others, purports to redefine the meaning of marriage itself, one must give pause. This is a monumental moment in the history of this nation. America will never again be the same. Barak Obama has kept his promise: he has indeed fundamentally transformed America.
In light of this decision, some have proposed abandoning the word marriage when referring to its true meaning and replacing it with the term Holy Matrimony. While I appreciate the sincere desire to distinguish the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony from the notion of “marriage” embraced by the Supreme Court, I firmly believe that we must reject this proposal. We must never surrender the meaning of the word marriage, nor can we simply replace it with the term Holy Matrimony. Doing so would not only be unrealistic and practically impossible; it would also be a serious error.
Marriage is about more than semantics. Marriage is the union of one man and one woman under God for life. That is the reality of what marriage is. This reality is part of the Natural Law, part of nature, part of creation. No court or nation could ever change it. Not even the Church may do so. Rather than abandoning the word marriage, Catholics should join with other Christians and redouble our efforts to pervasively affirm the true meaning of marriage everywhere we mention the word.
In fact, it isn’t correct to always replace the word marriage with Holy Matrimony. The two terms are not interchangeable. Marriage is the union of one man and one woman under God for life. Holy Matrimony: is “the sacrament by which a baptized man and a baptized woman bind themselves for life in a lawful marriage and receive the grace to discharge their duties” (Baltimore Catechism, No. 3, Q. 457). Notice that the word marriage is included in the definition of Holy Matrimony. The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony is an elevated state of marriage. But the institution of marriage itself existed long before Our Lord Jesus Christ instituted this sacrament. When God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony did not yet exist, but the Sixth Commandment forbidding adultery clearly shows that the institution of marriage already existed. When a Jewish man and woman are married today, they do not receive the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony either, but they are still joined together in marriage.
Furthermore, even if the terms marriage and Holy Matrimony were synonymous, it would be unrealistic to try to purge our vocabulary of the word marriage. The root of the word marriage is in several other related words. The following example illustrates this point. “I asked Christine to marry me. About seven months later, we were married. Marrying Christine was one of the best things I have ever done. Our marriage has truly been a blessing.” If we surrender the meaning of the word marriage, we unwittingly distort our own language when we use the words marry, married, and marrying.
Finally, the strategy of replacing the word marriage with Holy Matrimony when referring to true marriage would do more harm than good, because it is impossible to make this replacement completely. The word marriage occurs throughout Catholic literature, including the immense library of writings from the Fathers of the Church, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Canon Law, and the Catholic Encyclopedia. Most important, the word marriage appears in Sacred Scripture. For example, Hebrews 13:4 states: “Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled.” (Also see Matthew 22:30, Mark 12:25, Luke 20:34, and Revelation 19:7-9.) If we suddenly stop using the word marriage when affirming its true meaning, what will our children think when they find this word in all these writings?
The best solution is to keep using the word marriage, while repeatedly affirming its true meaning: the union of one man and one woman under God for life. That’s what we mean when we say marriage, and that’s what God meant when He established it. So let’s explicitly make that clear—over and over again. We have literature from thousands of years to support us. This does not mean that we should not also use the term Holy Matrimony. Perhaps it would be helpful if this term became more prominent, but not as a de facto replacement for the word marriage. When we want to specifically identify the sacrament, we could use the term Holy Matrimony. When we want to identify the institution itself, we should use the term marriage, while affirming its true meaning.
We should also take pains to never surrender the meaning of the terms husband, wife, man, woman, marry, married, marrying, marriage, or Holy Matrimony. For example, we should always use quotes around the oxymoronic term “same-sex marriage” and precede the phrase with the words “so-called” (as I did in the first paragraph of this article).
Let us never forget that what the Supreme Court declared is an impossibility, just as it would be an impossibility if the court declared that gravity no longer existed. This declaration changes nothing about the reality of what marriage is, has always been, and always will be: the union of one man and one woman under God for life. The word marriage is about more than just semantics. It is about what is real, what is true, and what is beautiful. In these tumultuous times, let us hold firm and take consolation in the truth. “Have you not read that He who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:4-5).