ABSTRACT
The Catholic Church in America witnesses some 250,000 marriages each year. Catholics take much of their conception of the nature, restrictions, privileges, and obligations of marriage from the Jewish tradition, but Christ added some new understandings. Moreover, marriage is not merely an act of "love", although it is also that. It is a juridical act, a sacramental act, a communal act binding a couple in both a sacramental and civic community. The marriage of a man and a woman, understood to be an image of the inner nature of God, has for some 5,000 years been honored as no other friendship. Marriage is one of those places in which religious faith is embodied in real lives. The attempt to pull faith and real lives asunder can and is being made today, but men and women of honor cannot allow that to be done to them.
