2005 Spring Marriage Supplement

Eucharist helps married couples love, trust
and respect each other

By Mary Ann Wyand

When a husband and wife pray together and receive the Eucharist at Mass, Father Joseph Moriarty explained, they are continuing to invite God into their marriage through the sacraments.

And when they show love, trust and respect for each other every day, he said, they are placing God in the center of their marriage and living out their marital vocation as members of the domestic Church.

In his ministries as director of the archdiocesan Office of Priestly and Religious Vocations and sacramental minister of Good Shepherd Parish in Indianapolis, Father Moriarty likes to remind engaged couples that their marriage is a lifelong vocation made possible by God.

Pope John Paul II reminds Catholics that, “Each Christian vocation comes from God and is God’s gift,” he said, whether that vocation is to the priesthood, religious life, married life or single life.

He selected that quotation from the Holy Father’s 1992 apostolic exhortation “Pastores Dabo Vobis” (“I Will Give You Shepherds”) as the theme for the 2005 religious vocations poster featuring a photograph of Archbishop Daniel M. Buechlein praying before the Blessed Sacrament and portraits of the archdiocesan seminarians.

Each person’s vocation is strengthened by reception of the Eucharist, he said, just as each person’s faith grows stronger by receiving the Body and Blood of Christ.

“We know the Church proclaims that the Eucharist is the central sacrament of our faith,” he said. “… because so many other sacraments are involved within the Eucharist. Connecting this to all vocations, those vocations are founded and nurtured in the Eucharist because, as we know through the Real Presence, we believe that the Eucharist is God, is the body and blood, soul and divinity, of Jesus Christ. And so rooted in that, Christian vocations grow and are nourished.”

When a couple is married at a nuptial Mass, they begin their vocation of marriage by conferring the sacrament upon one another, he said. “The priest is the witness to that along with the best man and the maid of honor and the community that gathers with them. Together, they celebrate that in the context of the Eucharist.

“God has loved them individually and they have individual relationships with God,” he said, “and now they are asking for God’s promise, God’s blessing, God’s presence. They’re asking for that sacrament, which has nourished them individually, to nourish them together as a couple as they begin their marriage vocation.”

By focusing on the Eucharist, Father Moriarty said, ­married couples can faithfully work through the many parenting and other challenges that life brings their way.

“The Eucharist is such a good example [for couples] because the Eucharist is a sacrifice, the Eucharist is an abiding presence of God and the Eucharist is a communion,” he said. “Those are three important things that are very present in any marriage, so when a couple attends Mass together, in the sacrifice of the Mass they can remember and recall that they’re called to make sacrifices for one another.”

During the sacrament of marriage, he said, “the man and woman are saying, ‘I choose this person. I choose to make this person first in my life, to be the most important person in my earthly life. I’m going to honor them, respect them, love them till death do us part.’ And that’s a sacrifice.”

Sometimes a husband and wife have to surrender, to forgive, to offer up, to let go, Father Moriarty said, so there’s a connection with the Eucharist as abiding Presence.

“When they come to Mass together and receive the Eucharist,” he said, “it is going to be food for their journey. It’s going to strengthen them to give themselves again and again and again in their marriage and to be faithful. That flows right into this notion of communion, commitment to God and commitment to each other. The Eucharist deepens the roots of their faith. So the husband, in many senses, will teach the wife and the wife will teach the husband about God and about God’s love and about God’s forgiveness. All this is nourished in the communion of the Eucharist.

“As the marriage grows, like all sacraments connected to the Eucharist, the marriage is supposed to be efficacious, to overflow with God’s grace,” Father Moriarty said. “And, of course, the Eucharist is the sacrament which nourishes that. It’s the presence of God, and it’s going to strengthen their work of giving themselves to each other in the vocation of marriage.”

It’s important for engaged couples to know that the nuptial Mass celebrates their love for each other in the context of the Eucharist, he said. “We’re doing that in the context of God’s love for us, in giving us his Son, and so that needs to be the center [of the sacrament and the vocation of marriage].” †