Priest reminds married couples: Marriage is journey to holiness
A local priest advocating for the strengthening of Christian family life lamented that several couples nowadays have disregarded the real sense of marriage.
Fr. Eligio Suico, chairperson of the Cebu Archdiocesan Commission on Family and Life Apostolate, said receiving the Sacrament of Matrimony is actually a response to God's call for couples to journey towards holiness. And to be holy means to be faithful to the vocation to which both are called, he added.
“Let us try to see marriage as a call to holiness. Whatever the situation will be, still the purpose of marriage is for both husband and wife to be happy. But the only way for them to be happy is to be holy and to be holy is to remain in love, to love the way how Christ has loved us,” he said.
However, Suico said several marital accounts today turn out to be on the contrary since many couples have gone their own separate ways, some even resulted in bloody and tragic encounters, because of unfaithfulness.
Suico said Matrimony is also a sacrament of vocation or a covenant that two people enter while the other is the Sacrament of Holy Orders wherein a single person choses the priestly life.
Suico said with God, married couples aim for His kind of love that he called the “give love.”
He said it is the kind of love that always desire for the good of the other partner, helping him or her to become better. On the other hand, humans alone with their own frailties could only breed “need love,” Suico coined.
This kind of love, he said, is when the person pursues another because there is a good thing in her that the person believes could fill in what is lacking in him. Suico said unsatisfied men tend to find love from other women that leads to infidelity or unfaithfulness. He clarified that there are also other factors that push men to find another. He said that by nature men are “polygamous.”
Suico emphasized that the very beauty of marriage is, because of Christ, it saves the man from being polygamous.
“The salvation of man is only in Christ. Men who are supposedly polygamous in nature, through Christ, he will become monogamous or faithful. Without Christ, men would tend to be more polygamous or adulterous,” he said.
There are still instances that even if the man is married, he still falls to temptation, he said.
“There is already rupture in us in our capacity to love. Human love is already tainted with sin. Instead of loving to treat the other as the subject, now because of the wounded nature of love, the other is treated as an object. That is why people become lustful,” he explained.
He reminded married couples to remain faithful to God and always think that the calling they entered into is a path towards holiness. He warned them of one's want for instant things or instant gratifications as influenced by modern lifestyle and culture.
“The call to holiness can only be answered if despite the vulnerabilities of the human person, still they will continue to love each other believing that the journey from sinfulness to holiness is not instantaneous, it's always a process,” he said.
Suico said couples can also be vulnerable to the disease of the devil if they have a weak prayer life.
He asked families and parents to set time for God, like hear Mass every Sundays or recite the Holy Rosary at home or join community prayers.
He urged them to be more participative to religious activities in their own parish or enter charismatic organizations like Oasis of Love or Couples for Christ.
To never lose sight of the value of marriage, both husband and wife should not only remain true to the sacred vows they shared but also to remain closer to the One who has bounded them that is God.