The priest José Fernández Castiella, in his book “Marriage, the great Divine invention”, presents the richness of conjugal theology and spirituality from an anthropological perspective: “I am not, I only am with others.”
Vatican News
“The relationship between a man and a woman has a beauty and depth that neither dogmatic theology nor sacramental theology can explain when they talk about marriage, but rather an anthropology that understands identity as a pure vocation that consists of reaching being in the plural, being able to say: I am us”, says José Fernández Castiella, author of the book “Marriage, the great Divine invention”.
The priest points out in the Ecclesial Note podcast of Vatican Radio – Vatican News that “the fact that marriage is a sacrament and that, therefore, the spouses who are ministers of that sacrament perform sacramental acts every time they update what they promise the wedding day, that is, every day that they are faithful, to the point of saying that an act of fidelity such as going shopping to have food in the pantry is an act of worship. It is a sacramental act because it is the way of living fidelity day by day. It seems to me that from there a very interesting, very deep conjugal spirituality can emerge, with an aspiration to holiness that has great beauty.”
Going deeper into the anthropological reality of “I am we” marriage, he explains that “personal identity is an identity that is in relationship and it is the essence of every person to know oneself in relationship. “I am not, I am only with others.”
Fernández Castiella hopes that with his book “to tell couples is that their love, their noblest loves, the human love between a man and a woman, makes present all that love of God, both in the order of nature and in the order of Grace. That is why marriage is a Sacrament. So marriage is a vocation par excellence.”
