National Marriage Week 2024: Satan Hates Marriage

We are nearing the end of National Marriage Week! Whether you’re married or engaged, thinking ahead to a life with your future spouse or living your vocation every day, I hope that this week has been a time of spiritual growth.

I’m so glad that the USCCB dedicates a week every year to praying for married couples. We spend a lot of time, as a Church, praying for men in seminary. We beg God for more callings to the priesthood but often we forget about marriage and holy, happy families being a major source of inspiration for young men who become priests!

Marriage is the common vocation, of course. I believe that is the main argument for why we are so quiet about marriage when we discuss vocations. The majority of people will get married, so there’s no need to talk about it.

But I believe this has consequences for our Church. I think we need to talk about marriage as a vocation much more often than we do. We celebrate with couples on their wedding day, but beyond that, how many of us can say we really take time to think about our married friends and pray for and support their marriage? As a Church, in practice, we don’t treat marriage like it is a vocation that should be taken as seriously as the priesthood or religious life.

Ask any married couple you know how they are doing and I will tell you: they’re struggling. Maybe (hopefully) not in their personal relationships with each other, but in the daily struggle that can ultimately affect how much attention and care we give to the vocation that is our spouse.

The thing is, if marriage — a lifelong, committed relationship between one man and one woman, which will ideally lead to children — was really the easier option, why did God wait until the Incarnation to do away with divorce? Why did our Jewish ancestors in the Old Testament take multiple wives? Why did God have to ease us into the expectations of marriage after the Fall if it was so much more natural, so much more common, so much easier?

If marriage is easier, why do we have such a hard time finding couples who stay together for the rest of their lives within our own society? Why do we struggle to find couples who remain faithful to the Church’s teachings on things like contraception? Why do we see so many families whose children (the few that they do have) fall away from the faith?

If marriage is easier, why does the priesthood not have laicization rates similar to divorce among Catholics?

Marriage is not an easier vocation than the priesthood or religious life. In the Garden, Satan not only disrupted our relationship with God, but he also targeted the relationship between husband and wife. For the first time, husband and wife felt animosity toward each other and they experienced lust. 

My priest made a beautiful recommendation in a homily to look at the pictures of the seminarians we have listed in our diocese and to pray for them every day — by name, if possible.

I can’t help but wonder what impact that might have on our families if we prayed for couples as they were entering marriage and experiencing it for the first time. What if we posted the pictures of couples getting married in our diocese and prayed for them? Can you imagine what that might do for the Church?

Satan attacked my relationship hard throughout the engagement process and has continued to attack us in our marriage. As the years have gone on, life has kept coming for us in a way that it didn’t before we said our vows. 

And what we learned from this is that we aren’t alone. We’ve reached out to some of our faithful Catholic couples and they shared similar experiences.

Satan hates marriage.

Satan hates marriage so much that we’ve all but forgotten about it as a vocation. Some even argue that it isn’t a vocation at all because it’s not “supernatural” in the way that the priesthood and religious life are.

Satan is attacking marriage just as much as he attacks our priests. Satan wants to keep us away from marriage as it was designed because marriage is a reflection of Christ’s love for the Church and of the self-giving love of the Trinity. 

If we truly want to increase our vocations to priesthood and religious life, we need to support our married and engaged couples. Our lives aren’t Disney movies, and our vows aren’t our Happily Ever After. When we get married, our new lives are just beginning, and Satan wants them to be horrible. 

Please, pray for the married couples in your life. And if you’re married, ask people to pray for you! 

You will all be in my prayers.