Question
How can one systematically define the rights and duties of marriage? Likewise, what are the goods of marriage? Thank you, and may God bless you.
Answer
I respond to your two inquiries.
I. The duties and rights of marriage
The Code of Canon Law states simply:
Each spouse has an equal duty and right to those things which belong to the partnership of conjugal life. Parents have the most grave duty and the primary right to take care as best they can for the physical, social, cultural, moral, and religious education of their offspring.1
Here are indicated:
1. Implicitly, the duties of spouses toward each other and toward society
In another canon, it is stated:
According to their own vocation, those who live in the marital state are bound by a special duty to work through marriage and the family to build up the people of God.2
The duty of spouses to transmit life must be considered:
Parents should regard as their proper mission the task of transmitting human life and educating those to whom it has been transmitted.3
It is a duty (and right) to manifest (and to manifest oneself) and to make mutual love progress:
Its very nature as an unbreakable compact between persons, and the welfare of the children, both demand that the mutual love of the spouses be embodied in a rightly ordered manner.4
Married people also have the obligation to live together and to help one another with life’s needs.
Uniquely, they have the obligation to render the conjugal debt, that is, the right to perform the acts that make them apt for the generation of offspring (consequently, they have the right to ask it of their spouse). They do not, however, have a “right to a child,”5 but rather to the natural acts that make possible the conception of a child.
2. Explicitly, the duties of parents with respect to their children
Namely: to provide, according to their strength, for the education of their offspring in all areas: physical, social, cultural, moral, and religious. This is also emphasized in Canon 226, §2:
Since they have given life to their children, parents have the most grave duty of educating them; therefore, it is primarily the responsibility of Christian parents to care for the Christian education of their children according to the doctrine taught by the Church.
On this point, Gaudium et Spes also insisted:
Children should be so educated that as adults they can follow their vocation, including a religious one, with a mature sense of responsibility and can choose their state of life; if they marry, they can thereby establish their family in favorable moral, social and economic conditions. Parents or guardians should by prudent advice provide guidance to their young with respect to founding a family, and the young ought to listen gladly. At the same time no pressure, direct or indirect, should be put on the young to make them enter marriage or choose a specific partner.6
The Declaration Gravissimum educationis insists:
Since parents have given children their life, they are bound by the most serious obligation to educate their offspring and therefore must be recognized as the primary and principal educators. This role in education is so important that only with difficulty can it be supplied where it is lacking. Parents are the ones who must create a family atmosphere animated by love and respect for God and man, in which the well-rounded personal and social education of children is fostered.7
At the same time, this is a right:
The family, since it is a society in its own original right, has the right freely to live its own domestic religious life under the guidance of parents. Parents, moreover, have the right to determine, in accordance with their own religious beliefs, the kind of religious education that their children are to receive. Government, in consequence, must acknowledge the right of parents to make a genuinely free choice of schools and of other means of education, and the use of this freedom of choice is not to be made a reason for imposing unjust burdens on parents, whether directly or indirectly. Besides, the right of parents are violated, if their children are forced to attend lessons or instructions which are not in agreement with their religious beliefs, or if a single system of education, from which all religious formation is excluded, is imposed upon all.8
II. The goods of marriage
Following St. Augustine, the goods of marriage have always been enumerated as unity, fidelity, and fecundity. Thus we read in the Catechism:
Conjugal love involves a totality, in which all the elements of the person enter — appeal of the body and instinct, power of feeling and affectivity, aspiration of the spirit and of will. It aims at a deeply personal unity, a unity that, beyond union in one flesh, leads to forming one heart and soul; it demands indissolubility and faithfulness in definitive mutual giving; and it is open to fertility. In a word it is a question of the normal characteristics of all natural conjugal love, but with a new significance which not only purifies and strengthens them, but raises them to the extent of making them the expression of specifically Christian values.9
Fr. Miguel A. Fuentes, IVE
