CASTI CONNUBII. - Encyclical of Pius XI, of 29 Dec. 1930, on Christian marriage (AAS, 22 [1930], pp. 539-90). The subject, always of the liveliest and broadest relevance in every age, takes on an importance altogether particular in our own days. On the one hand, in fact, divorce is accepted in almost all legislations and practiced with the most flippant unconcern; adultery is exalted, or at least treated with a sense of deplorable agnosticism in novels, in theaters, in cinemas, in newspaper chronicles; on the other, new pseudoscientific theories are spreading under the pretext of strengthening the race or public health, and a sense of misguided compassion casts into the shadows substantial truths, deplorable and fatal consequences, and unshaken doctrines of revelation. In reality everything conspires to depress the family institution, compromising the peace and serenity of the home, the education of children, and ends by shattering that fabric which is the family, the fruit of nature and of sanctifying Grace, willed by God as firm and indissoluble.
This is the subject on which the encyclical turns. The encyclical, having recalled that of Leo XIII, Arcanum, of 10 Feb. 1880, enters into the heart of the questions, dividing the treatment into three parts:
1. The three goods of marriage: the good of offspring, which constitutes its primary end, and gives parents the right and the grave duty to «receive it lovingly, nourish it kindly, educate it religiously»; the good of faith, which constitutes the unity of the spouses, founding it on a holy and pure love, on mutual help, moral and material, on a well-ordered and understood hierarchy, according to which the husband is the head of the family, the wife the heart; the good of the Sacrament, which represents the indissoluble union between Christ and the Church, which indissolubility brings the best advantages for the spouses themselves, for the children, for society.
2. The storm against the holiness of marriage, unleashed by egoisms and passions, caressed and aided by pseudoscience: temporary, companionate, trial marriages; birth control; therapeutic abortion, eugenics, sterilization, difficulties of cohabitation; mixed marriages, overreach on the part of the presumed authority of the State. The Church's condemnation of all these aberrations is clear and inexorable, founded as it is both on the open will of God, manifested by revelation, and on the fatal consequences that derive from them.
3. The restoration of the family, obtained through the return to those things which are the divine intentions: therefore spouses must always think that their union is the Sacrament of Christ and of the Church; seek to master the passions by acquiring self-mastery and above all by prayer, which brings strength and light. It is also necessary to prepare future spouses for marriage; to assist the poor classes, to practice on the part of private individuals and above all of the State those social provisions which ensure for all a tranquil and serene well-being. A useful and desirable means: mutual understanding between State and Church, from which the State must not fear any diminution of rights; an illustrious example: the Lateran Pacts.
Bibliography4 works
Celestino Testore