« CASTI CONNUBII ». — Encyclical of Pius XI, dated 29 Dec. 1930, on Christian marriage (AAS, 22 [1930], pp. 539–90). The subject, always of the greatest and broadest relevance in every age, has acquired particular importance in our own day. On the one hand, divorce is accepted in almost all legislation and practised with the most carefree nonchalance; adultery is exalted, or at least treated with a sense of reprehensible agnosticism, in novels, theatres, cinemas, and newspaper reports; on the other, new pseudoscientific theories are spreading under the pretext of strengthening the race or public health, while a sense of misunderstood compassion casts substantial truths, deplorable and fatal consequences, and the unshaken doctrines of revelation into the shadows. In reality, everything tends to depress the family institution, compromising the peace and tranquillity of the home and the education of children, and ends by shattering that structure which is the family, fruit of nature and sanctifying Grace, willed by God to be firm and indissoluble.
This is the subject addressed by the encyclical. Having recalled that of Leo XIII, Arcanum, of 10 Feb. 1880, it enters into the heart of the questions, dividing its treatment into three parts:
1. The three goods of marriage: the good of offspring, which constitutes its primary end and gives parents the grave right and duty to «welcome them lovingly, nourish them kindly, and educate them religiously»; the good of faith, which constitutes the unity of the spouses, founding it upon a holy and pure love, upon mutual moral and material assistance, and upon a well-ordered and understood hierarchy, according to which the husband is the head of the family and the wife its heart; the good of the Sacrament, which represents the indissoluble union between Christ and the Church, an indissolubility that brings the greatest advantages to the spouses themselves, to their children, and to society.
2. The storm against the sanctity of marriage, unleashed by selfishness and passions, indulged and assisted by pseudoscience: temporary, friendly, experimental marriages; birth control; therapeutic abortion, eugenics, sterilization, difficulties of co-
habitation; mixed marriages; subjugation by the presumed authority of the State. The Church’s condemnation of all these aberrations is clear and inexorable, founded both upon the manifest will of God, revealed through revelation, and upon the fatal consequences that proceed from them.
3. The restoration of the family, achieved through a return to the divine intentions: spouses must therefore always remember that their union is the Sacrament of Christ and the Church; they must seek to master their passions by acquiring self-control and, above all, through prayer, which brings strength and light. It is also necessary to prepare future spouses for marriage; to assist the poorer classes; and for private individuals, and especially the State, to put into practice those social measures that ensure everyone a tranquil and peaceful well-being. A useful and desirable means is mutual understanding between State and Church, from which the State need fear no diminution of its rights; an illustrious example is the Lateran Pacts.