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<\/a><\/div>\nIn honor of our 25th wedding anniversary today and especially in honor of Katie, the only person I know who would gladly swim off one of the Aran Islands in March and without whose courage and goodness (who knows?) I might not have had what it takes to stick with a marriage, even to such an exceptional person, for 25 years, or long enough to become a Catholic who, now bolstered by faith, upholds and defends the inviolability of marriage between a man and a woman, and especially this man and this woman\u2014In honor of all this, I say, I\u2019ll quote a few excerpts from the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the subject of matrimony. Words to live by\u2014<\/p>\n
1602 Sacred Scripture begins with the creation of man and woman in the image and likeness of God and concludes with a vision of \u201cthe wedding-feast of the Lamb.\u201d Scripture speaks throughout of marriage and its \u201cmystery\u201d . . .
1603 . . . God himself is the author of marriage. . . .
1604 God who created man out of love also calls him to love\u2014the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being.
1613 On the threshold of his public life Jesus performs his first sign\u2014at his mother\u2019s request\u2014during a wedding feast. . . .
1617 The entire Christian life bears the mark of the spousal love of Christ and the Church.
1640 . . . the marriage bond has been established by God himself in such a way that a marriage concluded and consummated between baptized persons can never be dissolved.\u00a0
1641 . . . The grace proper to the sacrament of Matrimony is intended to perfect the couple\u2019s love and to strengthen their indissoluble unity. By this grace they \u201chelp one another to attain holiness in their married life and in welcoming and educating their children.\u201d
1642 Christ is the source of this grace. . . .<\/i>
1643 \u201cConjugal love involves a totality, in which all the elements of the person enter . . . \u201c
<\/i>1644 The love of the spouses requires, of its very nature, the unity and indissolubility of the spouses\u2019 community of persons, which embraces their entire life . . .
1646 By its very nature conjugal love requires the inviolable fidelity of the spouses.
1648 It can seem difficult, even impossible, to bind oneself for life to another human being. This makes it all the more important to proclaim the Good News that God loves us with a definitive and irrevocable love, that married couples share in this love, that it supports and sustains them, and that by their own faithfulness they can be witnesses to God\u2019s faithful love. <\/p>\n
Happy anniversary, darling.<\/p>\n
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