A wedding homily

Christian matrimony is not simply the union of two people who love each other but something much more profound and more sublime: it is the total donation of the husband to his wife and of the wife to her husband to realize, through loving one another, the designs of God, to support each other in the obstacles of life and to collaborate in the Creator’s plan, perpetuating life in the world, natural life, and with the help of the Church, the supernatural life. In this way, the canticle of love is prolonged through new beings that would praise and love God in time and in eternity.

In order to achieve this work, Jesus Christ in his divine power has made you both ministers of a sacrament. In the remaining sacraments of the Church the ordinary minister is the priest: it is he who consecrates the Body of Christ, he who pardons sins; in the sacrament of matrimony you are the ministers, you who by your definitive and irrevocable “yes” are joined for eternity, obtain from God an increase of grace for your lives: the grace of the presence of God within you by Baptism, increased through the reception of the sacraments; you now increase it once more in this celebration of matrimony. This divine assistance, more than any human quality, will make the entrance into this new life you now embrace, tranquil, full of optimism and sincere joy.

Christian matrimony, seen like this, increases its right to be respected and venerated by men, for Jesus had no objection in offering it as an example and model to describe the love he had for the Church. St. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians wrote: Husbands love your wives just as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her (5,25). This love of Christ for his Church must be the model of Christian matrimony: the wife, companion of man and not his servant as in pagan antiquity, subject to her husband as the Church is subject to Christ; the husband loving his wife as his own body, as Christ loved the Church, and in his excessive love for her, did not hesitate to give his life and die for her, that is to say, for us.

Husbands and wives celebrate Christian marriage and live afterwards according to it. On fulfilling their matrimonial duties, they grow from day to day in holiness, that is to say, in friendship with God. At the same time they deepen and intensify their love upon discovering that both share the same love, the greatest in life: God, whom we are obliged to love above all things and they will find themselves perpetually united in a happy eternity, without the shadow of pain nor of new separations.

My dear young couple, this is what I have asked for you from the Lord, today at Mass. That in these times when the family suffers from so much corruption and dissolution, that your new home be an example, all the more visible as your situation becomes more prominent. May your home reflect the austerity of the Chilean homes of the past that made our country great. These are my fervent prayers on blessing your marriage in the name of the Church.