By Jean Parietti
The surprising sacrament of matrimony
As a teenager, “Mary” was an energetic and faithful member of her parish, attending Sunday Mass, joining the youth group and being confirmed. So when Mary’s pastor, Father Tom Vandenberg, ran into her about a year after her high school graduation, he was shocked to learn she had gotten married outside the church.
“Apparently, getting married in the Catholic Church didn’t register with her. It is as if she hadn’t ever heard she needed to,” as Father Vandenberg tells the story in his recent book, Rediscovering a Pearl of Great Price: The Surprising Sacrament of Matrimony.
But Mary’s story isn’t unusual. The number of marriages celebrated in a Catholic church has fallen nearly 60 percent since 1972, according to Sheila Garcia, associate director of the U.S. bishops’ Secretariat for Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth, citing a study conducted for the secretariat by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University in Washington and released in 2008.
Good friendships with married couples and his work with Worldwide Marriage Encounter have influenced Father Vandenberg’s understanding of marriage during 51 years as a priest. The couples he knew gave him an up-close look at how they lived out their vocation, and an appreciation for their commitment to each other and their children.
In his book and marriage retreats and talks, Father Vandenberg is spreading a message about the importance of matrimony that many Catholics have never heard.
It’s a vocationSacramental marriage is a call from God for the life of the church. Couples marrying in the church not only enter a covenant with God and each other, but also with God’s people, the church community. Those who choose to marry outside the church might as well tell the church family that the relationship with them, established in baptism, doesn’t matter.
Catholics need to be reminded that marriage is a vocation. Marriage is “like the forgotten sacrament,” Father Vandenberg said, and it’s time to restore a sense of vocation for couples entering the sacrament of marriage.People talk of the shrinking number of priests in the U.S. as a vocations crisis, but it’s not the only one. “I think there’s as much a shortage of couples who understand the sacramental nature of matrimony as there is a shortage of priests,” Father Vandenberg said.
It’s a model of forgivenessWhen disagreements and conflicts arise in a parish or the broader church, they can polarize and produce an “us against them” mentality. But the institutional church can take a lesson from the “domestic church,” as the family is often called.
Married couples are meant to teach the rest of the church about loving and forgiving each other as Jesus loves and forgives. When a married couple still loves each other despite imperfections, challenges, hurts and disagreements, it’s a tangible example for the church family of resolving differences from a position of love and for the sake of the relationship.
“If you take forgiveness and mercy out of the Gospel, there’s no Gospel left,” Father Vandenberg said. “Who models this more than a married couple? I don’t know of anyone.”
It’s a school of loveWhen they understand their marriage as a vocation, married couples are more than just models of love. They make Christ’s love real, which can touch and influence other people, most especially their children. Parenthood is a grace of matrimony, and with that grace comes a great responsibility of raising children in an environment where there is no place for lingering anger, criticism, apathy, irresponsibility and pride.
“The reason the home is so important is because it’s the school of love,” said Father Vandenberg.
He grew up in a home where he never doubted his parents loved him. The way they lived their vocation wasn’t extraordinary — they loved each other, loved God and loved their four boys.
“When they did wrong, they could forgive each other,” he said. “I was so blessed with ordinary folks, because the grace is in the ordinary.”
It’s a social sacramentMatrimony is meant to work hand-in-hand with holy orders, the other social sacrament. Married couples are called by the priest, on behalf of the church, to love beyond themselves. In turn, couples call their priest to have a depth of love for his people, as Christ does.
When he was assigned to St. Vincent de Paul Parish in 1983, Father Vandenberg inherited a parish that had a family ministry office and a track record of special groups and events to support families and married couples. He always en-joyed reminding his parish couples that he believed in them “as a sacrament of the church.”
Priests and parishes must encourage marriage vocations as much as vocations to the priesthood and religious life, he said. Parishes can support married couples in their vocation in a variety of ways, such as: celebrating significant anniver-saries publicly, announcing upcoming marriages, blessing families liturgically on special occasions, encouraging families to attend Sunday Mass together and creating mentoring programs that match younger and older married couples.
Father Vandenberg thinks people are responding to the message: “It’s resonating. It makes sense. I think maybe mar-riage could be coming into its own if we really could proclaim what it’s meant to be.”
August 23, 2013