The second kind of aid that the Church offers the working class, in order to provide remedies for its material distress as well, is the Christian family along with its foundation, Christian marriage. The Christian family provides the working class with three essential advantages that are also of profound importance for its economic circumstances.
One danger that threatens the working class is the dissolution of all truly organic ties that protect and guard its individual life. We need only recall the first group of relief measures proposed by the liberal party. How far this dissolution will proceed in the future is something we cannot estimate. Even the family is not supposed to be excluded from it. Among these measures, we also find the principle that marriage should be freed of all obstacles whatsoever. We do not wish to deny that, in some regions, getting married has become excessively difficult; on the other hand, a certain degree of restriction is legitimate, well-founded in reason as in Christianity, and abolishing all restrictions can only promote recklessness in entering into matrimony and thereby damage the family. Also relevant here is the effort to view marriage as a purely civil institution, to introduce civil marriage. The strength of the family resides absolutely in religion and in the Christian doctrine of marriage. It is, above all, the view of the Catholic Church – that marriage is a sacrament, and that the bond of marriage can be dissolved only by death – that provides the unshakeable foundation of its strength. If marriage is viewed merely as a civil institution, and if this view were to permeate a people, then Christian marriage would be finished. The marriage tie would soon appear as a civil contract that one could then abolish at will through mutual consent, and the number of grounds for civil divorce would then increase indefinitely. But this goal will encounter a triumphant opposition from the Church and Christianity, in conjunction with the conscience of the Christian people, and it will not succeed – neither by way of civil marriage, nor by promoting rash marriage unions, nor by facilitating divorce – in destroying this God-given organism [Gen 1:27 ff.; 2:18-24] whose power to bestow blessings on all members of the family is immense.
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