owns and operates everything and gives to all its citizens according to their predetermined need. In a society such as this, competition in economic endeavors simply does not exist. There is no private property, no free market, and, most especially, no God.
Leo XIII used strong words to describe the negative consequences of these beliefs. He even went so far as to call Marx’s socialist ideas a “deadly plague that is creeping into the very fibers of human society and leading it on to the verge of destruction.”21 Pope Leo warned that this kind of socialism seeks to destroy the institution of marriage and the sacredness of the family. He asserted that the “foundation of this society rests first of all in the indissoluble union of man and wife according to the necessity of natural law.”22 Yet, the “doctrines of Socialism strive almost completely to dissolve this union.”23
In Karl Marx’s very design, the state usurps the rights and functions of the family, “shattering society into tiny atoms whirling around a single nucleus: the federal government.”24 While socialists such as Marx thought in only two categories — the individual and the state — our Catholic faith teaches us that “society and the state exist for the family.”25 Arcanum Divinae was the first document of its kind, in that it “single-handedly inaugurated modern Catholic teaching on marriage and family.”26
Arcanum Divinae
Blessed John Henry Newman once paid Pope Leo XIII the ultimate compliment by saying that he had the “virtue of humanity.”27 For a century, Pope Leo guided human hearts, soothed their pain and sorrow, all while pointing “his finger upward to the higher places of the better life.”28 He was known for his firmness, his gentleness, his frugality, and his broad generosity, all at the same time. Indeed, these are the characteristics that stand out in his encyclical letter that focused on Christian marriage. As he crafted it, he was well aware of the suffering and desperation that had overcome so many people, particularly those in the working class. When they bled, he bled. Nevertheless, he was convinced that the truth really does set us free.
In writing this document, Pope Leo’s main concern was the secularization of marriage. He attributed this to: (1) the separation of the secular marriage contract from the Catholic Church’s Sacrament of Matrimony; (2) the rise in the number of lawful divorces; and (3) a society that was becoming totally degraded by its abandonment of God.29 Pope Leo laid all of these negative consequences at the feet of socialism (the “state”), which he had renounced in another document two years earlier. He positively rejected Marx and his socialist ideas because of their adverse effects on the family. He argued that the family has priority over the state; that, in fact, there would be no state without the family.
Leo used Arcanum to clarify the lines between the Church and the state, particularly related to marriage and family. “Since family life is the germ of society, and marriage is the basis of family life, the healthy condition of civil no less than of religious society depends on the inviolability of the marriage contract.”30
Pope Leo was “ever at pains to show that the Church does for the state what the state cannot well do for itself: she makes citizens of the city of God, citizens who make for something like a just city here below.”31 He warned against those who would remove marriage from the sovereignty of God by withdrawing it from the jurisdiction of the Church and turning it into a simple civil contract. This, he taught, strips marriage of its sacredness and reduces it to a “common secular thing.”32 He wrote repeatedly that marriage is part of God’s natural law, and as such the state cannot claim what rightly belongs to God.
“What Did God Intend?”
Pope Leo introduced this encyclical on Christian marriage by placing it in its proper context, by asking the question, “What did God intend?” Since marriage is part of God’s creative design for humanity, we can be sure that he had a plan, one that is very familiar to us. Looking back to the very beginning of humanity, the pope reflected:
The true origin of marriage is … well-known to all.… We record what is to all known, and cannot be doubted by any, that God, on the sixth day of creation, having made man from the slime of the earth, and having breathed into his face the breath of life, gave him a companion, whom He miraculously took from the side of Adam when he was locked in sleep. God thus, in His most far-reaching foresight, decreed that this husband and wife should be the natural beginning of the human race.33
Even from the beginning, God’s creative design for humanity came in the form of marriage between a man and a woman. This divinely inspired companionship manifests itself in “two most excellent properties — deeply sealed, as it were, and signed upon it — namely, unity and perpetuity.”34 In other words, God intended marriage to be exclusive and until the death of one spouse.
Yet the pope well understood that in a fallen world hearts are easily hardened. He recognized all too well that, through human weakness and willfulness, marriage became corrupted; Scripture and ancient history reveal all too plainly how polygamy destroyed marriage’s unity, and divorce its perpetuity:35
This form of marriage, however, so excellent and so preeminent, began to be corrupted by degrees, and to disappear among the heathen; and became even among the Jewish race clouded in a measure and obscured. For in their midst a common custom was gradually introduced, by which it was accounted as lawful for a man to have more than one wife; and eventually when “by reason of the hardness of their heart” [Mt 19:8], Moses indulgently permitted them to put away their wives, [and then] the way was open to divorce.36
We as Christians thus have so much to be thankful for, because through the mercy of God and in the fullness of time our Savior, Jesus Christ, came to restore “the world, which was sinking, as it were, with length of years into decline.”37 Indeed, Christ came to make “all things new” (Rv 21:5):
Christ our Lord, setting himself to fulfill the commandment, which His Father had given Him, straightway imparted a new form and fresh beauty to all things, taking away the effects of their time-worn age. For He healed the wounds which the sin of our first father had inflicted on the human race; He brought all men, by nature children of wrath, into favor with God; He led to the light of truth men wearied out by long-standing errors; He renewed to every virtue those who were weakened by lawlessness of every kind; and, giving them again an inheritance of never ending bliss, He added a sure hope that their mortal and perishable bodies should one day be partakers of immortality and of the glory of heaven. In order that these unparalleled benefits might last as long as men should be found on earth, He entrusted to His Church the continuance of His work; and, looking to future times, He commanded her to set in order whatever might have become deranged in human society, and to restore whatever might have fallen into ruin.38
In his saving work, Christ restored the original design of human marriage and then, to sanctify more thoroughly this institution, “Christ our Lord raised the marriage contract to the dignity of a sacrament.”39 In light of this, by way of “tradition and the written word [coming] through the Apostles,”40 the Church has always maintained that in order to uphold the dignity of marriage as a sacrament, we must think of the marriage contract and the Sacrament of Matrimony as one and the same thing. Consequently, there cannot be a marriage contract among Christians that is not a sacrament.
In a sacramental marriage, husband and wife are “to cherish always a very great mutual love, to be ever faithful to their marriage vow, and to give one another unfailing and unselfish help.”41 In a similar way, children are to submit to their parents and obey them, “while parents are bound to give all care and watchful thought to the education of their offspring.”42 Continuing this line of thinking, Pope Leo wrote:
Not
