“’By their very nature, the institutions of matrimony and married love are disposed toward the birth and education of offspring, which are as though their crowning achievement. In this way, a man and a woman, who by the marriage covenant “are no longer two, but one flesh” (Matt. 19:6), through the intimate union of their persons and actions render each other mutual help and service and experience the meaning of their oneness, which increases day by day. This deep bond arising from the mutual gift of self of two persons, as well as the good of the children, requires the total fidelity of the spouses and calls for the indissoluble oneness of their life together’ (Gaudium et Spes, Section 48). This conciliar text makes it perfectly clear that parenthood constitutes the central meaning of the marital community. In the birth and education of offspring, the spouses ‘experience the meaning of their oneness, which increases day by day.’ The meaning of the marital communio personarum and it involves, particularly conjugal intercourse, is the child. In other words, the meaning of marriage is the family. One of the reasons children come into the marital community of husband and wife is to confirm, strengthen, and deepen this community. In this way, the spouses’ own interpersonal life, their communio personarum, is enriched.” (Karol Wojtyla, “Parenthood as a Community of Persons” in Person and Community, page 332).
I am fascinated by the concept of communio personarum (or communio) as I think it is the best definition of marriage that I have encountered. In “The Family as a Community of Persons”, Bishop Wojtyla defines “communio [personarum]”: “Communio in the primary sense refers to community as a mode of being and acting (in common, of course) through which the persons involved mutually confirm and affirm one another, a mode of being and acting that promotes the personal fulfillment of each of them by virtue of their mutual relationship.” (Karol Wojtyla, “The Family as a Community of Persons”, Person and Community: Select Essays, p. 321). In this description I see the active as well as the metaphysical, providing a base from which to marry in addition to being married. Just as “love is a task”, marrying (marriage) is a task: learning and choosing the good for the other, giving of oneself to the other, and receiving the other. And, just as in the Trinity, this marital love is generative, actively generating a third person in the life of their child through their marrying.
The child is not simply another person to whom life is “bestowed” by the married couple and God, the child is an expansion and extension of the communio that is the marrying couple, that is begun and continues; in some way the child has always been part of the marriage and becomes known through the conjugal act, a revelation of the communio of marriage. This activity of the child in his emerging into being and developing physically is part of the same communio that is present before and after conception: “The real introduction to the family community, to the communio personarum, occurs when the parents fully discover in their child the task that together with the child presents itself to their love. In order for this task to be fully discovered and carried out, it must be discovered gradually and carried out gradually” (Ibid., page 333).
This is a different way of looking at marriage and family rather than the reductive and sequential Western view, where marriage, fecundity, and family are more discrete and separate, where one “produces” a child in some way, and where family does not necessarily mean communio but is reduced to three individuals living together. It gravely illuminates the inseparability of the procreative and unitive aspects of marriage in that it describes fecundity as not only connected to the fertility of the married couple but also to the expanding of the communio of marriage into the communio of family, extending the task of marital love into the task of family love. This frames the vigorous love of courtship and matrimony as part of the same whole as the communio of family, comprising therefore these two aspects of marriage by a larger system, a “form” of communio. Thus, the love of courtship continues, matures, and perfects as part of one semantic process which describes one indivisible whole.
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