We live in a society today where children are, on the whole, no longer seen as a blessing. Somewhere along the way we, as a society, decided that children are a right every woman has. A right she may choose to exercise, or not, depending on her own personal circumstances. At the same time, we tend also to see children as a burden. How common it is to hear someone comment that they did not intend to have children until they had ‘lived their life first’?
What we are confronted with then, is society at large, who sees children as a commodity – something that can be avoided by contraception, deleted by abortion and then created by artificial means such as IVF when women’s biological clock has almost run out.
What many fail to realise is that children are a blessing that results from the intimate union of man and woman. Indeed, God did not have to link procreation with sexual intercourse and yet he chose to. He chose to link the creation of new life with the intimate union that is reserved for marriage. ‘By its very nature the institution of marriage and married love is ordered to the procreation and education of the offspring and it is in them that it finds its crowning glory.’ (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1652)
Therefore, marriage is crowned by children. But the fruitfulness of our marriage does not depend solely on the number of our children. Indeed, ‘The fruitfulness of conjugal love extends to the fruits of the moral, spiritual, and supernatural life that parents hand on to their children by education. Parents are the principal and first educators of their children. In this sense the fundamental task of marriage and family is to be at the service of life.’ (CCC 1653)
The service of life: this is a beautiful way of describing the role that marriage and family should play in our lives. If we live out the Sacrament of Matrimony in its fullness, we reject the selfish way of viewing children as a burden or a commodity and can appreciate the miracle of life in all its glory. Truly, we can be in awe, over and over again, as we ponder how our marital love can bring forth new life, a new person, into the world.
Further to this, we are compelled to educate our children morally, spiritually and supernaturally. How can we do this adequately if we see them as burdens, or a commodity? The truthful answer is that we can’t. If we truly want our marriage to be fruitful then we need to understand that children are a blessing. The reality is of course, that there are married couples who use contraception and even some who will abort their children as a result of their own circumstances.
Those who choose to use contraception within marriage, or chose to abort their children, are actually refusing fertility. The Catholic Church clearly states that such a refusal ‘turns married life away from its ‘supreme gift,’ the child.’ (CCC 1665)
We need to change our society’s way of thinking. It is through our support of good Catholic marriages and families, and indeed our encouragement of all young people discerning their call to marriage, that we can start to turn the tide and learn to value the gift that children are, instead of taking them for granted.
‘A child is not something owed to one, but is a gift. The “supreme gift of marriage” is a human person. A child may not be considered a piece of property, an idea to which an alleged “right to a child” would lead. In this area, only the child possesses genuine rights: the right “to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents,” and “the right to be respected as a person from the moment of his conception,”’ (CCC 2378)
Originally posted 2014-12-04 21:42:40.