It is indeed the higher calling, because it embraces as reality what marriage images to us. Marriage is not just some earthly thing – it is a sacrament, and a sacrament as we know is a visible sign of an invisible reality, instituted by Christ to impart grace. The sign of baptism is water and it images the cleansing action of the Holy Spirit. The sign of confession is the priest’s words of absolution that tell our senses what our soul is experiencing – the forgiveness of God.

So what is the sign in marriage? The sign is the couple, and they image God’s love. They are an image of love to their children, their family, and their friends, but most importantly they are an image of God’s love for each other – a love that is total, free, fruitful, and permanent. So earthly marriage points us to God, and tells us something about God’s relationship with His Bride the Church. Marriage has no inherent meaning if it does not do so. It helps us understand how good God’s love for us is, because we understand how good our spouse’s love for us is.

But in Heaven, we won’t need the sign anymore, because we will have the reality in front of us. We won’t need our spouse to be a sign of God’s love, because we will encounter God’s love in actuality. This is why Jesus tells us that the children of God do not give each other in marriage in Heaven – we will still be in relationship with each other, but not in a sacramental sense anymore.

Celibacy is a foregoing of the earthly good of marriage to cleave to the heavenly reality – rather than take on a spouse as a sign of God’s love, they bind themself directly to God and so show us what marriage is ultimately pointing to. They live out in their earthly lives what we will live out in our heavenly ones.

So marriage is a great good, but celibacy is even more so because it forgoes the sign for the reality.

Hopefully, that helps you out!

Here are some great sites for information:
http://www.onemoresoul.com
http://www.creightonmodel.com

I’m expecting my third child, and I’m decidedly stretched out and tired and everything is far saggier than it was a few years ago. =) I am also a Protestant who believes that children are a huge and wonderful blessing from the Lord… and that non-abortive birth control and limiting family size are completely permissible.

I agree with your assessment of the shallowness of American culture when it comes to women’s bodies… but I don’t think that it’s as simple as a “contraceptive culture” creating it. A culture that doesn’t value family and children enough created this… and that is not limited to a particular view of the appropriateness of various types of birth control. There are so many of us who feel completely ok with limiting our family size who greatly value our children and families, and we’re willing to pay the price of youthful beauty for those children just like you are.

Being young and selfish makes a lot of women value their tight bodies over pregnancy because they lack the imagination and wisdom to see how much richer having children is than perfect thighs. This is a problem whether you’re Protestant or Catholic…

I think you are coming at this issue from an angle that is simply too narrow and shows a flawed view of Christian theology that is different from your own… and you really don’t have to.

I’m expecting my third child, and I’m decidedly stretched out and tired and everything is far saggier than it was a few years ago. =) I am also a Protestant who believes that children are a huge and wonderful blessing from the Lord… and that non-abortive birth control and limiting family size are completely permissible.

I agree with your assessment of the shallowness of American culture when it comes to women’s bodies… but I don’t think that it’s as simple as a “contraceptive culture” creating it. A culture that doesn’t value family and children enough created this… and that is not limited to a particular view of the appropriateness of various types of birth control. There are so many of us who feel completely ok with limiting our family size who greatly value our children and families, and we’re willing to pay the price of youthful beauty for those children just like you are.

Being young and selfish makes a lot of women value their tight bodies over pregnancy because they lack the imagination and wisdom to see how much richer having a children is than perfect thighs. This is a problem whether you’re Protestant or Catholic…

I think you are coming at this issue from an angle that is simply too narrow and shows a flawed view of Christian theology that is different from your own… and you really don’t have to.

Well, NFP can be used with a contraceptive mentality, certainly. But here again, God gives us the gift of free will. Whereas we can choose to be open to life with NFP– which means team work, discipline, and clear communication between husband and wife, and of course trust in God.

We don’t have that flexibility with a condom. NFP can be used to space pregnancies, certainly, AND a couple can use it to get pregnant, and not just to delay pregnancy if necessary (after all the Church does not teach that “God will provide” means abject irresponsibility on our part and then “leaving God to sort it out.” That’s where both reason and free will come in. They have to work in tandem with faith). A condom immediately says, “nope, don’t wanna get pregnant”; no other way to interpret it.

It is used to justify the denial of funding to medical programs that distribute condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS and other STD’s. Those diseases kill people. Lots of people. By denying protection against these diseases, the Church itself shares in the responsibility for these deaths.

I would refer you to what the Pope really says about condoms in Light of the World. The Church’s teaching about condoms and AIDS notwithstanding, condoms are available to people who are going to procure and use them anyway. Of all those years of advocating condoms, the spread of AIDS and STDs have not gone down. The point being that if people think they can have sex without consequences, then they engage in more risky behavior. Furthermore, all methods of artificial birth control have a built-in failure rate. Which means that somewhere down the line, with constant use of a condom, one of them is going to fail.

Tell me: while sex is definitely a part of human life, does that mean that we ought to be driven by it? Again, hard questions. Again, there’s that little thing called free will: just because we can, does that mean that we should?

I wouldn’t be so quick to toss the likes of Humanae Vitae into the “dustbin of history,” therefore.

No, she does not. That understanding is not only inaccurate, but incorrect.

Celibacy is a calling, and not everyone is called to it. But it is nonetheless, as St. Paul tells us, a worthy and noble one. That does not imply that it is either more than or less than marriage. Marriage is but another state that a person may be called to.

…especially the part about women being seen as property. Indeed, the part in the book of Genesis, with Adam and Eve being turfed from the garden of Eden due to sin, whereby part of the price of that sin is that the husband shall rule over the wife (quite a contrast from a proper reading of Ephesians 5).

Because to God, we are always somebody. In the wise words of Pope Benedict XVI: “each one of us comes from a thought of God: each one of us is loved, each one of us has value, each one of us is necessary.” And indeed, God loved us first– long before any other human being, or certainly culture, ever thought to condescend to do so.

It does, therefore, make the words of Dostoevsky weigh even more heavily on my mind: “if God does not exist, is not all permissible?”

Including, therefore, the ability of a popular culture driven by marketability to determine the value of not only things, but people?

I don’t fear being seen as a has-been at fifty, and that’s not because I see myself as particularly young and pretty. But I am content with the way God made me, and I feel immensely grateful being able to look in the mirror and smile– genuinely smile– with love at the way He made me. That said, that realization did indeed take me a while.

It’s why when I look at a culture that makes “old” ladies feel less valuable, less beautiful (because they’re not as “pretty” and “young” anymore), and that they should be “put out to pasture,” I feel awful for them. Certainly not because I am scared that I’ll “end up that way” (I’ve long thought about how I’d like to age with grace, and it does not involve frantically trying to look like what I did when I was younger– I just want peace, tranquility, prayer, and to be surrounded by beauty in books, plants, people, art, service, and music). But because I can’t stand to see *any* woman treated that way or value/devalue herself that way.

“Christians should be having better sex lives than the world.”

Why would you think that this boils down mostly to sex, and why is your measurement for “better” defined by, over, and against the world? Also, why would you think that because we are God’s people, that we are should be having better sex lives than the world, or even better lives than the world, period? I don’t mean to come off as accusatory, but that remark does sound a little… entitled. Also, just because Catholics don’t put pleasure first, that does not mean that we believe in “stale, sexless marriages.” Pleasure is a part of sex, certainly. But so are children. To foreground pleasure risks turning it into the greater end of sex.

For one thing, define “better life.” Is this meant to be measured materially? And what of suffering? Where does that fit in? It does not mean that we live stale lives that always wear us down (for one thing, who says that an abundance of material goods and pleasures don’t produce such a life?). And yet, as Christians, we are called to serve others. And that also means that there are times in our lives where we are called to suffer for those who need it most.

I could be wrong, but I don’t believe that Song of Solomon (the Bible’s sex ed course, so to speak) focuses on procreation. Pregnancy is just a natural effect of sex.

Really. And what about the rest of the Bible, read holistically? The Song of Solomon needs to be read with everything else in the Bible; it all needs to line up and balance out. While pregnancy is a natural effect of sex, it is not– and should not be treated as– a side effect of sex, either. There is pleasure, certainly, but there is also responsibility, which, properly understood does not hamper pleasure, but instead balances it diplomatically, not tyrannically.

Sex in marriage is for the purpose of bonding the couple (two becoming one flesh), comfort, and procreation. God is a multi-tasker!;)

Indeed. God is a multi-tasker: while giving us bonding, comfort, and procreation as a couple, he also gives us as individuals– also exercised within the boundaries of marriage– the gifts of faith, reason, and free will.