From Christian marriages, says Leo, "the state may rightly expect a race of citizens animated by a good spirit and filled with reverence and love for God, recognizing it their duty to obey those who rule justly and lawfully, to love all, and to injure no one" (Arcanum divinae) ... Are we to believe that men who are shameless and shiftless in the most intimate and most socially productive of human relations will be animated by civic responsibility and love of neighbor in their public actions, where their duties are less clear and the opportunities for self-serving almost limitless?
Every sin against marriage is a sin against the very possibility of any kind of society at all. Every Christian marriage begun in purity and continued in faithfulness and duty and love is an exemplar for all social relations and allows us to imagine something better than the loneliness of self-will "wedded," in ghastly symbiosis, to the inhumanity and insanity of economics without households, and a State without citizens.This is a great book. I have trouble not highlighting every paragraph.
AMDG
No comments:
Post a Comment