303. Married sex as sacramental
303. MARRIED SEX AS SACRAMENTAL
Is sex part of the sacrament of Matrimony? Does marriage make sex sacred?
In every sacrament there is a spiritual operation by means of a material operation which signifies it. Thus in Baptism the inward spiritual cleansing is effected by a bodily cleansing. . . . In matrimony there is a kind of spiritual joining together in so far as matrimony is a sacrament, and a certain material joining together in so far as it is directed to an office of nature. . . . [T]he spiritual joining is the effect of divine power by means of the material joining (S45,1).
“The material joining” St. Thomas speaks of is twofold: it is both the free consent of the will to marry, which is the efficient cause of marriage, and also the sexual intercourse that “consummates” the marriage—that is, consummates the sacrament, since marriage is a sacrament. Sexual (and spiritual) intercourse and its natural effect, children, is the end or “final cause” of marriage. Sex is for babies as well as for love. That’s a “Duh!” to every culture but our own. The chief effect of modern “sex education” is ignorance: ignorance of the single most obvious and important fact about sex, so that babies are now seen as “accidents”. (That’s like seeing bodily growth as an “accident” of eating.)
Like every sacrament, in marriage “there is a spiritual operation by means of a material operation which signifies it.” By the double material operation of the audible words of consent and the act of sexual intercourse, there is “a spiritual operation”, i.e., something really happens: God creates something new, a new person, a new kind of person, a collective person, a double person, a couple, a family. It is a miracle; it is something only God can do. “What God has joined together, let no man [claim to] put asunder.” This is the reason the Catholic Faith not only forbids divorce but claims that it is a superstition, a myth, a lie: there is no such thing.
Marriage, then, is a divine act, a divine miracle, effected at the moment of consent, the “I do”, which is the first of the two “material operations” that constitute this sacrament. Sexual intercourse is the second of these two “material operations” that constitute this sacrament. What happens in sexual intercourse is also a literal miracle, a divine act. For in it God (sometimes) creates, out of nothing, a new human soul that is immortal and destined for infinite and unending ecstasy in union with God in Heaven. Man and woman do not create, but only procreate. They supply the bodies but God supplies the souls. They supply the landing field but God sends the planes down to land. They are like the priest at Mass who supplies the material, audible human words “This is My Body” and “This is My Blood” that become the material instrument of the supernatural miracle of transubstantiation.
This is why sex is holy, and why all cultures in the history of the world except our own have intuitively seen this and surrounded it with sacred rules and taboos. This is the essence of “the sexual revolution”: not so much a different practice (that’s just a difference in quantity: we’ve always disobeyed the rules, though not as much as today) as a different vision, a different “big picture” understanding.
Pope St. John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” restores and explicates the old “big picture” of sex as sacred, sacramental. It also shows us (rather than just asserting and proving, as did Humanae Vitae) why contraception is not only wrong but sacrilegious: it is like a priest celebrating the Mass but only pretending to say “This is My Body” because he does not want God to come and perform the miracle of transubstantiation. Sex is like the Mass and a woman’s body is like the altar. Contraception locks the door against God’s miraculous act of creation. It says to God: “We don’t want You here, we want to be alone. We don’t want You to do Your thing, we just want to do our thing.” It forgets that it takes “three to get married”. (That’s the title of an excellent book about marriage by Fulton Sheen.)
If you don’t want to eat, don’t sit in the dining room. If you don’t want to wash, don’t go to the wash room. If you don’t want God to come, don’t go to Mass. Or to marriage.