CANA IS FOREVER



COUNSELS FOR BEFORE AND AFTER MARRIAGE



Charles Hugo Doyle


Nihil Obstat:  JOHN M. A. FEARNS, S.T.D. 
               Censor Librorum

Imprimatur:    +FRANCIS CARDINAL SPELLMAN 
               Archbishop of New York 
               January 5, 1949

Copyright 1949 by The Nugent Press, Tarrytown, N. Y.
Printed in the United States of America



IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER, MOTHER, AND BROTHER



CONTENTS

        Gospel Story
        Prologue
1.      Marriage Is a Career
2.      This Thing Called Love
3.      Remote Preparation for Marriage
4.      Proximate Preparation for Marriage
5.      Mixed Marriages Are Dangerous
6.      The Great Sacrament
7.      The Period of Adjustment
8.      Basic Requisites for Marital Happiness
9.      The Great Sin in Marriage
10.     Marriage Wreckers
11.     The Important Role of Parents
12.     Cana Is Forever 

At that time . . . There was a marriage in Cana of Galilee: and the 
mother of Jesus was there. And Jesus also was invited, and his 
disciples, to the marriage. And the wine failing, the mother of 
Jesus saith to him: They have no wine. And Jesus saith to her: 
Woman, what is that to me and to thee? My hour is not yet come. 
His mother saith to the waiters: Whatsoever he shall say to you, do 
ye. Now, there were set there six waterpots of stone, according to 
the manner of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three 
measures apiece. Jesus saith to them: Fill the waterpots with water. 
And they filled them up to the brim. And Jesus saith to them: Draw 
out now and carry to the chief steward of the feast. And they 
carried it. And when the chief steward had tasted the water made 
wine, and knew not whence it was, but the waiters knew who had 
drawn the water, the chief steward calleth the bridegroom, and 
saith to him: Every man at first setteth forth good wine, and when 
men have well drunk, then that which is worse. But thou hast kept 
the good wine until now. This beginning of miracles did Jesus in 
Cana of Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples 
believed in him.
                              (St. John 2:1-11)



PROLOGUE

". . . and Jesus also was invited" (to the marriage).

IF YOU ARE contemplating matrimony as a career and you honestly 
want your marriage to be an unqualified success, your task may be 
far greater than you realize.

Today, in this country, one out of every three marriages ends in 
divorce or separation. So oft repeated is this in the press that it 
now produces little more than the raising of eyebrows. What really 
would prove startling would be an accurate survey of the felicitous 
state of the other two-thirds who maintain common domicile alone 
through force of public opinion, circumstances or, as they say, "for 
the sake of the children." I would venture a guess that at least one 
half of the two-thirds who do remain together experience 
unhappiness in all its various shades from the powder gray of 
discontent to the deep black of desperation. The tragic failure of 
so many others only proves that many pitfalls await you in 
marriage.

Taking unto oneself a partner, for better, for worse, for richer, for 
poorer, in sickness and in health until death, is serious business. A 
happy and successful marriage is one of life's greatest blessings. 
On the other hand, an unhappy marriage is one of the cruelest 
afflictions that can befall anyone. Who fails at marriage fails at 
living!

The pages that follow have been written with the hope that they 
will assist those contemplating marriage to choose wisely and well. 
They are written, too, for those who have quaffed deeply of the 
heady wine of wedlock and found it sometimes very sweet and 
sometimes very bitter, and also for those whose complete 
disillusionment has made them so cynical that they pronounce the 
word "marriage" with all the fervid sadness and loathing with 
which Job must have said "boils."

If you are standing only on the shores of the sea of matrimony, or 
if you have already set sail and find yourself tossed about on the 
topmost waves, this book is for you. Read it carefully, follow its 
counsels, and you too may be spared the folly of so many others: 
that of dropping broken pitchers into empty wells and growing old 
in drawing nothing up.

Since marriage is such a hazardous venture it would appear 
reasonable that God should provide men and women with certain 
guiding principles to insure its success. That is why, in my mind, 
Cana of Galilee assumes such tremendous importance. It is a 
spiritual Baedeker for matrimonial careerists.

Nothing that God ever does is the result of mere chance. 
Everything is divinely planned to the minutest detail. Christ's 
presence, therefore, at the marriage in Cana was not accidental but 
pre-ordained from all eternity. Indeed, the evangelical prophet 
Isaias foretold centuries beforehand that the light of the Messias 
would first shine in Galilee. And shine it did, in the miracle of the 
changing of water into wine, and again in the miraculous curing of 
the sick child.

That Cana was chosen for two great miracles, the first in tribute to 
conjugal love, the second in tribute to paternal love, removes all 
doubt as to its being anything but a place of God's special 
predilection and providence. The events that took place there 
followed such a pre-eminent pattern that they ought not to be 
considered as favoring individuals but rather as extending to the 
instruction and ennoblement of all mankind, especially to those 
embracing the marital state.

There is deep significance in the fact that the Son of God chose a 
banquet table as a backdrop for the event that marked the 
beginning of His public ministry and again another banquet table 
to preface its ending. As an invited guest at the marriage feast in 
Cana, Christ changed water, universal symbol of sorrow and tears, 
into wine, symbol of joy and love. As host at the Last Supper, the 
same Christ changed wine into love's overflow, His own most 
precious Blood. When William Makepeace Thackeray remarked that 
meals with friends were "the greatest vehicles of benevolence," he 
provided a more than adequate explanation for Christ's presence 
in Cana in Galilee and again in the Upper Room in Jerusalem.

Certainly, it was no mere coincidence that He who came to redeem 
a world plunged into degradation by the reckless action of the first 
man and his wife should perform His first miracle as the Messias 
for another man and his wife. It would appear that Our Lord, by 
gracing with His presence the marriage in Cana, and making of it 
the occasion for working such a striking miracle, wished to 
demonstrate to all men that the ultimate success of the work of 
redemption of mankind would rest with the family unit as such.

Terse as Saint John's accounts are of the events at Cana, they 
nevertheless would provide adequate material for numerous 
volumes of essays and many years of meditation. Regarding the 
first miracle, there is the question of why Our Lord chose Cana at 
all, a village of fewer than six hundred souls, when He might have 
chosen the crowded city of Jerusalem, or even the palatial summer 
home of the rich Simon, the Pharisee, at Magdala. There is the 
matter of the amount of water made wine--more than eighty 
gallons--or the fact that the miracle was done through the 
intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary simply because she 
remarked to her Son, "They have no wine." Again, there is the point 
that the names of the bride and bridegroom are not recorded, as if 
God covered this couple with anonymity to impersonalize the 
whole affair.

Likewise, the second miracle is equally rich in exegetical material. 
There's the question of who the royal official was, whose son was 
mortally ill; the nature of the illness; whether it was the little son 
who had asked his father to seek out the Divine Physician, or 
whether the father had sought Christ without the child's 
knowledge. These and a thousand other questions would provide 
interesting material for many a book. There is even a font of 
hidden meaning in the word "Cana" itself, as well as in its 
providential geographical position, to say nothing of the deep 
significance of the rich ceremonials of that day, especially those 
surrounding the ancient Jewish marriage ceremony.

Out of the wealth of essay topics provided by these and other 
incidents relative to Cana of Galilee, I have chosen to write the 
present volume around certain points in the scriptural accounts 
that in one way or another indicate guidance toward success and 
happiness in marriage. For instance, the lamentable and alarming 
numbers of marriage failures today may be traced to the fact that 
too many who enter this sacred relationship fail either to invite 
Christ to their marriage or, having done so, fail to follow in 
married life the counsel our Blessed Lady gave to the waiters at 
Cana: "Whatsoever He shall say to you, do ye." Again, the failure of 
the wine would indicate inadequate preparation, and the failure of 
many modern marriages may be traced to the same cause. If there 
is one career that demands prayerful consideration and careful 
preparation it is marriage. Circuit Judge L. D. Miller of 
Chattanooga, Tennessee, who has handled over twenty-five 
thousand marriage failures in his long career, unreservedly asserts 
that over forty per cent of those marital tragedies resulted from 
hasty marriages of the physically and mentally immature. Cana's 
lessons thoroughly applied will help you to avoid such pitfalls.

Indeed, narrow is the gate to marital bliss and few who enter 
therein; but with a consciousness of its hazards and a 
determination to avoid them, by the grace of God, you can make a 
grand success of your marriage. At least, that is the prayer of the 
author.



Chapter One: MARRIAGE IS A CAREER

There is something formally prohibitive about a sign on a door 
reading "No Admittance Except on Business," and it usually gets 
results. There would be fewer disappointing marriages if none 
entered the sacred relationship but those bent on serious business. 
Believe me, marriage is serious business. It is no lark, no adventure 
in the vacuous emotion of youth; it is a decision that will affect for 
life, and perhaps for eternity, not only oneself but one's partner 
and any children God may send.

Marriage is a career, one so vital and so splendid that it ranks next 
to the priesthood and religious life in the trinity of top-flight 
careers in the world. All other careers are incidental to them. The 
fact that marriage was the first career ever to be embraced by man 
is most significant. And our common Father, Adam, when his pure 
gaze fell upon the first incarnation of unalloyed womanhood, Eve, 
proclaimed the inviolable law that was to bind all his descendants 
until the end of time: "Wherefore a man shall leave father and 
mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one 
flesh." (Gen. 2:24.)

The etymological meaning of the word "career" is interesting. It 
comes from the Latin word carrus--"wagon"--and means literally 
something that carries one along a road. In this sense, marriage is 
truly a career--one instituted by God Himself to carry a man and 
his wife and their children along life's highway to heaven.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "career": "As a course of 
professional life or employment which affords opportunity for 
progress or advancement in the world." According to this 
definition marriage certainly qualifies as a career. History bears 
this out. There was hardly ever a great deed done by man that did 
not somewhere bear the fingerprint, no matter how faint, of a fond 
mother or a loving wife. How often have we not heard successful 
men humbly proclaim that the Herculean feats they have 
accomplished they owe to a devoted, saintly wife.

Indeed, not only is marriage a career that affords opportunity for 
spiritual and temporal progress and advancement in this life, but it 
reaches far into the next. "Marriage," said Taylor, "is the mother of 
the world, and preserves kingdoms, and fills cities and churches, 
and heaven itself. The state of marriage fills up the number of the 
elect and hath in it the labor of love and the delicacies of 
friendship, the blessing of society and the union of hands and 
hearts. It is indeed the very nursery of heaven."

The nature of man's career in marriage consists primarily in a 
permanent union for the procreation and education of children, 
the provision of a home, support of his wife and his offspring, 
constant vigilant care for the spiritual and temporal welfare of his 
household. The nature of a woman's career in marriage consists in 
the bearing and education of children, insoluble union, home-
making and housekeeping. These are not matters of choice but of 
obligation.

A married man may give proof of power to rule an empire, master 
abstruse sciences, write immortal tomes--yet if he fulfills not the 
primary ends of the marriage career he is a failure.

A married woman may win by her particular capabilities and 
capacities the plaudits of the world for her contribution to medical 
and scientific research, or for works of art that grace the greatest 
museums and art galleries in the world; yet if she fulfills not the 
primary ends of her marriage career she is indeed a failure. Her 
first duty is to be a wife and mother and homemaker.

Failure to realize that marriage is a career is one of the tragedies 
of our day and the chief cause of the countless broken homes. 
People readily accept law, teaching, medicine, nursing, singing 
and advertising as careers, but neglect to include matrimony 
among the top-flight careers. Important as all careers may appear 
to be, only two were elevated to the dignity of sacraments--the 
priesthood and marriage. That consideration above all else should 
merit for the matrimonial state special veneration.

No one would deny that for Gainsborough painting was a career, 
after feasting one's eyes on his famous Blue Boy. But what 
comparison is there between the colored oils skillfully blended on 
canvas by the hand of the artist and a tiny, lovely infant born to an 
adoring mother and father whose union had been sanctified in 
marriage? If painting the picture of a child is a career, dare we 
deny that parenthood is a career?

What artist could reproduce the faint azure blue of a baby's eyes 
or gather rays of pale dawn and distill therefrom the delicate pink 
that graces a baby's dimpled cheek? Who but God, in using human 
agencies, could put such innocence and trust into a baby's smile 
or bless such frail little hands with enough terrible strength to 
help weld two hearts into one until death do them part?

No one would think of denying that teaching is a high career, but, 
by far and large, the first and most important school is the home, 
and the most influential teachers, all mothers and fathers.

Nursing is a career, but a mother's untaught hands can often heal 
and nurse with such latent skill that they can coax a waning life 
back to strength when it has slipped beyond the reach of a 
registered nurse and even the physician.

If entertaining an audience from the stage, screen, or over the 
radio is a career, creating joy and happiness in a home is also a 
career.

Diplomacy is a career, but where is diplomacy so necessary and so 
frequently required as in marriage? Indeed, the keeping of a 
husband or a wife for life demands more consummate diplomacy 
than that ever exercised by Richelieu and Churchill together. The 
author of the "Lady of the Lake," Sir Walter Scott, sums up for 
husbands the most contradictory and salient characteristics of all 
wives in a single verse thus:

     "Oh woman! in our hours of ease, 
     Uncertain, coy, and hard to please, 
     And variable as the shade 
     By the light quivering aspen made;
     When pain and anguish wring the brow, 
     A ministering angel thou."

Some careerists are successful though they may only practice the 
virtues requisite to their own particular vocations. Thus, it is quite 
possible for a doctor to be successful in medicine or surgery 
without having to practice the subtle arts of the diplomat. When a 
traffic officer stops your car and roars at you that highly original 
greeting, "Pull over, Buddy. Where's de fire?", it is evident that his 
career as such does not require the sympathy and gentleness of 
the mortician.

Marriage as a career differs from all others inasmuch as it 
demands for its success a great combination of many virtues and 
qualities peculiar to many particular careers. Marriage demands 
the patience of the teacher, the training of the psychologist, the 
diplomacy of the statesman, the justice of a Supreme Court judge, 
the sense of humor of a good comedian, the self-sacrifice of a 
good doctor, "the-customer-is-always-right" attitude of the 
successful department store salesman, the mercy of the confessor, 
and so on, ad infinitum.

Having once established the fact that marriage is a topflight 
career, it naturally follows that the same rules govern its success 
as govern those of other careers. Every successful career demands 
adequate preparation, intelligent earnestness, persistent industry, 
and the will-to-win, but marriage demands all these, plus the 
anointed strength of love.

If every couple would but bring to marriage one half the 
consuming zeal for success that Thomas A. Edison brought to his 
scientific career, how different many of them would be!

As a youth, Edison spent long dreary hours practicing on the tiny 
telegrapher's key, learning the code and manner of sending and 
receiving messages. There was a four-day walk from Port Huron to 
Boston in search of work. There was the penniless arrival in New 
York and a chance job repairing a telegraphic communication 
system in a stock exchange on Wall Street that led to financial 
betterment, but it was dogged determination to succeed that made 
him so outstanding as a scientist.

Take, for instance, Edison's work on the carbon filament. In 
October, 1879, he determined to make his experiment work if it 
was the last thing he ever did. So convinced was he that the carbon 
filament was utilizable that he refused to leave his laboratory until 
he completed his work. On the second night he said to his 
associate, Charles Batchelor, "We will make a lamp before we sleep 
or die in the attempt," and make it he did, though it took four 
sleepless days and nights before the now famous Edison 
incandescent light was invented and the whole lighting system 
revolutionized in the world.

Edison's career was successful solely because he brought to it a 
determination to succeed no matter what the cost. Success in any 
field rarely comes without great sacrifices. One has only to read 
about the life of Madame Curie and her devoted husband and 
follow the discovery of radium to evaluate the cost of success in a 
career.

Madame Curie's sufferings as she worked in the smoke-filled shed, 
cold in the winter and stifling hot in the summer, defy description. 
The work of days became months and years, and failure dogged 
her every minute of the time, but Marie Curie, with terrible 
patience, continued to treat kilogram by kilogram the tons of 
pitchblende residue. Poverty hampered her in the acquisition of 
adequate equipment. The obstacles seemed insurmountable in the 
forty-five months of experimentation, but in the end the Curie 
work produced radium.

Who could look at the great Marie Curie as she lay on her 
deathbed, after thirty-five years' work with radium, and see her 
tired, burned, scarred hands without realizing the awful cost of 
success in a career?

Success in marriage depends upon acceptance of the fact that it is 
a career and upon the readiness and willingness to bring to it all 
the determination possible to overcome every difficulty and 
obstacle on the road to success. If a marriage breaks up, it is not 
because a man or woman must accept defeat but because the 
defeat is willed.

A kite cannot be made to fly unless it goes against the wind and 
has a weight to keep it from overturning. No marriage will succeed 
unless there is readiness to face and overcome difficulties and a 
willingness to accept the responsibilities of a parent, for 
parenthood is the weight that keeps most marriages from 
somersaulting.

When Divine Love Incarnate came to Cana of Galilee to sanctify 
forever pure conjugal love, He came to that marriage fresh from 
His terrible bout with Satan.

Since the first man and his wife had succumbed to temptation in 
the Garden of Eden, it was divinely planned that Christ, the New 
Adam, should permit the same tempter to attack Him and be 
ignominiously defeated and thus set a pattern for all to follow in 
the resistance of temptation. His sacred presence at the wedding 
was ever to be an earnest of the help and special graces He would 
grant those called to the marriage career who would likewise resist 
the onslaughts of Satan. Yea, more, Our Lord would elevate 
matrimony to the dignity of a Sacrament and make of it a veritable 
channel of special graces.

It is worthy of note, however, that while en route to Cana, the 
Master called His first five apostles, one of them being Nathanael 
(St. Bartholomew), a native of Cana of Galilee. The timing of 
Nathanael's call to the apostolate was, doubtless, to indicate the 
primacy of dignity and honor of the priesthood and religious life 
over marriage, and that, in that very order, they would form a 
trinity of top-flight careers.

It was only after choosing a nucleus for His priesthood that Christ 
went down to the marriage at Cana of Galilee.



Chapter Two: THIS THING CALLED LOVE

Lord Bacon, one of the great English philosophers and essayists, 
tells us: "He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to 
the question--when a man should fall in love and marry--'a young 
man not yet, and an older man not at all.'"

I, for one, cannot dismiss the feeling that the formulator of that 
answer was either once in love and was jilted, or he was married 
and his wife beat him. Love is the wine of existence and marriage 
is an honorable estate, or, should I say, for some it is an 
imperative one, and go along with Saint Paul, who fiercely puts it: 
"For it is better to marry than to be burnt."? (I Cor. 7:9.)

In the second chapter of the Book of Genesis we are told that when 
the world was in its freshness of new beauty and Adam was master 
of it all, God saw the need of making a companion for him. One 
thing was lacking: "for Adam there was not found a helper like 
himself" and "it was not good for man to be alone"; and so God 
made Eve. Strange as it may seem, falling in love means searching 
and finding in another, the partner who will make it easier for you 
to fulfill your destiny and realize God's plan for yourself. At least, 
that is one conception of love.

A clear-cut definition of love is not as easy to find as one might 
imagine. Few encyclopedias even carry the word. They devote 
pages to economics, art, and music, but ignore love. The writers of 
books on marriage either avoid giving a definition of it or frankly 
admit that it is indefinable. Cole Porter went so far as to set the 
question "What Is This Thing Called Love?" to music, yet he gave 
no satisfying answer. The inimitable George Bernard Shaw when 
invited to contribute to a book on marriage replied: "No man dare 
write the truth about marriage while his wife lives." Perhaps that 
answer may supply a key to the problem of why so few have dared 
to define love. There may be as much "dare not" as "cannot" 
involved in this complex matter.

The gifted St. Thomas Aquinas had no inhibitions on the subject 
and boldly declared that "to love a person is to wish him well." And 
Webster, as we shall see a few pages hence, goes along with the 
Angelic Doctor on that definition.

Sir Walter Scott says:

     True love's the gift which God has given 
     To man alone beneath the heaven. 
     It is not fantasy's hot fire 
     Whose wishes, soon as granted, fly; 
     It liveth not in fierce desire-- 
     With dead desire, it doth not die.

     It is the secret sympathy, 
     The silver link, the silken tie 
     Which heart to heart and mind to mind 
     In body and in soul can find.

To Scott, then, love is a composite thing which, laying hold upon 
one's nature, binds it with another in secret sympathy. Like grace, 
the effects of love are easier to treat than its nature.

Love, like death, is the universal leveler of mankind. It is nature's 
motive and reward. "We are all born of love," said Disraeli, "and it 
is the principle of existence and its only end."

It is only natural that since love was to be the mainspring of man's 
existence it would be the very thing Satan would endeavor to 
counterfeit. Thus true love, like every genuine thing of value, has 
numerous imitations. The cruel task for many is to sift the wheat 
from the chaff, to distinguish the true from the false, the precious 
metal from the slag. There is but one thing against which genuine 
love is helpless and that is time. Love is like wine in that age 
improves the good and sours the bad.

If we are to accept modern songs, novels, the radio, and movies as 
our criteria, we shall believe that love comes at first sight and with 
such a crushing force that one is powerless to resist. Such, 
however, is not the case. If love were always to strike like 
lightning, then no one would be safe. Your mother might be 
smitten by the paper boy and your father by John's Other Wife. 
Momentary attraction must not be confused with love, for love 
needs time.

Love at first is fancy, then there follows admiration, joined with 
respect and devotion. In this melange of emotions there occurs, 
sometimes, violent agitation, but more often there is a gentle 
simmering, a confused but agreeable mingling, until gradually all 
becomes transfused into a vital feeling called love. "The 
introduction to this felicity," says Emerson, "is a private and tender 
relation of one to one, which is the enchantment of human life; 
which, like a certain divine rage and enthusiasm, seizes a man at 
one period and works a revolution in his mind and body; unites 
him to his race, pledges him to the domestic and civic relations, 
carries him with new sympathy into nature, enhances the power of 
his senses, opens the imagination, adds to his character heroic and 
sacred attributes, establishes marriage and gives permanence to 
human society."

Since so much depends on love for abiding happiness in marriage, 
it stands to reason that a comprehensive understanding of what 
real love is takes on paramount importance. There is nothing so 
misunderstood and no word so abused as the word '"love." Little 
boys and girls "love" candy; women "love" mink coats; trees in 
every village and in every lane have "love" carved in their bark, 
and fences on every back street proclaim that A.B. "loves" C.D., 
while recapped Romeos whisper it gently and its magic is 
supposed to make liberties righteous. Ignorance of the 
development of love, as well as the multitudinous forms love 
takes, makes for the misunderstanding of it. A great many people 
imagine that all children are born with an innate love for their 
parents and their immediate family; that, later, puppy love 
develops; and finally that they will quite naturally go through the 
process of dating, courting, and then marry. Would that it were 
quite so simple!

Under the most favorable conditions everyone's love life develops 
through five stages. The first stage comes in infancy when, as Dr. 
Vladimir G. Eliasberg, a psychology professor at Rutgers 
University, says, we begin by being narcissistic--that is, lovers of 
ourselves. Next comes our love for our Parents--then a love for our 
playmates--then a crush on a companion of the same sex (for 
example, a girl's crush on her teacher)--finally, as teen-agers, we 
show the usual interest in the opposite sex, with thoughts of 
finding a life mate and marriage.

During any one or all of these stages, external forces may hinder 
or help the growth of love. Let us examine some of these 
hindrances or helps in detail. For instance, in the first stage of 
narcissism, a child in the normal home learns to depend upon its 
parents and finds it easy to transfer some of its love from itself to 
its parents. In those homes, on the other hand, where the child is 
definitely not wanted and lacks love, that child is a cheated 
individual and because he is not loved he refuses to love in return. 
In order to acquire a fine personality, a child must feel himself a 
worthy and wanted member of the family. A child needs to feel 
secure. Without security he is cheated, and a cheated child is a 
future delinquent. Parents who really love one another and who are 
considerate of one another and avoid harshness naturally provide 
the best background for the child's security. The shrewish, 
nagging, domineering mother will stunt the growth of a child's life. 
The proud, arrogant, sawdust-Caesar-like father, who rules his 
home with dictatorial edicts, will set a pattern for his child's later 
love life. Knowingly or unknowingly, we become like those with 
whom we live and associate.

Another extremely important matter in the growing love life of a 
child is the proper attitude toward sex. The vast majority of 
children will grow up, choose a mate, and find in marriage the 
fulfillment of a real vocation. How successful this venture will be 
will depend upon a sensible sex education in the home. Growing 
up in a home where there are condemnation and embarrassed 
looks when the child asks the normal questions about sex and 
questions concerning life's beginnings, as if it were something 
terribly unclean and sinful, tends to make of it a personality 
problem. Curiosity is merely whetted by such mid-Victorian 
attitudes and the child will seek information elsewhere. Parents 
actually warp a child's sex life by their attitude of evasion or 
embarrassment when sex is mentioned. It suffices to say here that 
the best Catholic authorities assert that parents should avoid the 
extremes of prudishness on one hand and vulgarity of detail on 
the other. Pope Pius XI, in the Encyclical letter "On Christian 
Education of Youth," pointed out the duty of parents to instruct 
their sons and daughters in sex matters when they are requested to 
do so by their offspring.

Sex questions should then be answered directly and reverently. 
The way in which parents handle this problem may affect their 
children and their children's children for generations.

Still another way the love life of a child or teen-ager may be 
permanently affected is that by which a selfish mother or father 
resents sharing the child's affection with friends and playmates. A 
mother who emotionally ties a child to her apron strings does that 
individual a great injury. Obstacles placed in the way of a child's 
development in normal friendships can later turn out to be a real 
booby trap. Parents should endeavor to develop in their children, 
from early years, a wide range of friendships with other children 
of both sexes. The mother who boasts that she is her "son's best 
girl" and who is eternally berating all girls as flirts, and who, to her 
daughter, pictures all men as "wolves," does her offspring a 
disservice. The teen-ager's normal adjustment may be impaired or 
irreparably damaged by such conduct.

Let us now consider some of the different manifestations of love. 
There is, as we all know, such a thing as a deep love of country; 
there is the love in friendship such as that which existed between 
Jonathan and David and between Our Lord and Saint John; there is 
filial love such as exists between a child and its parents; there is 
romantic love such as exists between two lovers; and nuptial love--
that which exists between a man and his wife.

Common sense tells us that in each of the above cited examples, 
the love is different. For instance, the simpler love in friendship is 
more or less restricted in external expression, for while there is 
genuine esteem and deep regard, we do not kiss or fondle all our 
friends. Again, the love that exists between members of the family, 
while much more demonstrative, has definite natural limits. A 
mother will have as deep and abiding a love for her child as she 
has for her husband, but the difference lies in the fact that her 
love for her husband is flavored by sexual attraction. The romantic 
lovers will love their parents, brothers, and sisters, but the love 
between themselves is the sexually flavored variety. And sexual 
attraction is a normal, natural, healthy desire, created by God 
Himself, without which few men and women would desire to marry 
and have children. Frankly, without sex attraction the human race 
would soon die out.

A deep understanding of the different kinds of love will keep 
parents from making the mistake of resenting the romantic love of 
sons and daughters. The new love will not extinguish filial love, it 
will strengthen it.

Romantic love is such a subtle thing that human intelligence must 
be assisted by divine grace to be able to discern the true from the 
false. Few realize that true love is, as defined by Webster, "a desire 
for and earnest effort to promote the welfare of another," and not 
simply another name for external manifestations of affection and 
sex satisfaction. Nuptial love that is built on passion alone is 
doomed to failure. Almost all passions are temporary by nature. 
We know from experience that the passion of anger, for instance, 
is rarely able to be sustained at a high pitch. Once we "get even" 
with our enemy, the force of the rage is spent. The same is true of 
love as a passion, for from this point of view the chief pleasure is 
in anticipation and once its object is attained it may wane and 
even pall. Marriage must be built on a much firmer basis.

A happy marriage depends on one's early education in what real 
love is and what it is not, and what its end and object are. A happy 
marriage depends too on one's capacity during courtship to 
discern true love from mere infatuation. Love whets the appetite; 
infatuation leaves hunger still.

     "Love hath its seat 
     In reason and is judicious,"

says Milton, while infatuation directs action without reason and 
precludes judgment. Love is a learned quality; infatuation is a play 
of humor in the blood. Infatuation can even be a one-sided affair, 
but not so, love, for as the Italian proverb says, "To love and not be 
loved is time lost." One strives in vain to light a cigarette from a 
dead coal.

A doctor of medicine, a close friend of mine, and I were discussing 
a young man, a problem child, in whose case we had both become 
concerned. I ventured to suggest that what really ailed the boy was 
that "he had a touch of love." "You ought to know better than that," 
said the doctor. "Love is like diabetes. There is no such thing as a 
touch of it. You have it or you don't have it."

Granted that one knows when he or she is in love, is there no 
infallible way of telling the genuine from the unreasonable 
facsimile? I'm afraid not, but I hasten to say that you can be 
morally certain your love is true and genuine if you find 
gentleness, beauty, refinement, generosity and intelligence and a 
reciprocal love made up of all these qualities and one that 
outdistances your love, day by day, month by month. What? No 
sex? Yes, indeed, but when two persons are really in love and that 
love is genuine, the sex feelings are so controlled that, without 
realizing it, they find great pleasure merely in being in one 
another's company.

Newell W. Edson of the American Social Hygiene Association, in a 
pamphlet entitled "Love in the Making," has listed the following 
signs as indicative of true love:

1. A genuine interest in the other person and all that he or she says 
or does.

2. A community of tastes, ideals, and standards with no serious 
clashes.

3. A greater happiness in being with this one person than with any 
other.

4. A real unhappiness when the other person is absent. 

5. A great feeling of comradeship.

6. A willingness to give and take. 

7. A disposition to give fair consideration to the other party's 
judgment.

8. A pride in the other person when comparisons are made. 

9. A wealth of things to say and do together.

Mr. Edson neglected to mention something that I consider a most 
indicative sign of love, and that is a willingness to sacrifice 
oneself for another--to sacrifice something prized by the giver. 
Sacrifice stimulates love while expressing it. It was Antoine de 
Saint-Exupery, I think, who said: "The mother gives nourishment 
from her own body for her child. By her giving she creates her 
love. To create love we must begin by sacrifice. Afterwards it is 
love that makes the sacrifices. But it is we who must take the first 
step."

Emerson sums up the whole problem in his own inimitable way as 
follows: "All that is in the world, which is or ought to be known, is 
cunningly wrought into the texture of man and woman:

     The person love does to us fit 
     Like Manna, has the taste of all in it."

Upon parents, teachers, and clergy alike falls the grave obligation 
of forewarning and forearming teen-age youths against the folly of 
permitting themselves to "go steady" during high-school years. 
Youth must be taught the dangers of this procedure well in 
advance of its actuality, for once the love-bug gets them they 
become blind to reason and deaf to admonition. Teen-agers must 
be shown that the wisdom of nature must be respected and that 
ventures into love demand maturity--physical, intellectual, and 
emotional maturity. The bird does not leave the nest until its 
wings are grown strong enough to carry it. The chrysalis does not 
tear open until there are wings to take the tiny insect aloft. Teen-
agers likewise ought to wait until they are of proper age before 
going steady or being allowed to do so.

My experience with adolescents has been that under ordinary 
circumstances, they react favorably to logic. For instance, few 
teen-agers would let themselves fall in love during their high-
school years if they knew that more than sixty-nine per cent of 
those who were madly in love during that period of their lives did 
not marry the object of this youthful affection at or after the age 
of twenty-one. This proves simply that a person at twenty-one has 
a different sense of values than at, say, sixteen or seventeen.

No youth would fail to condemn the folly of a sixteen-year-old lad 
who had set his heart on a red convertible coupe and had gone so 
far as to have a car salesman give him several road 
demonstrations, but who at the same time had no money to buy a 
car, no money for its upkeep, no place to keep a car, and, lastly, 
couldn't drive a car. Now, applying the same reasoning to steady-
company-keeping by minors, it is easy to point out the utter folly 
of permitting themselves to fall in love until they are old enough 
to distinguish real love from mere infatuation; until they are 
mature enough to assume the complex and responsible duty of 
parenthood; and until they have the income sufficient to establish 
and maintain a home. Teenagers should ponder the wisdom of the 
words of Owen Felltham, who warns that "love is never lasting 
which flames before it burns."

A person may not vote until his twenty-first birthday has been 
reached. Now, this legislation was enacted simply because the 
politicians felt that anyone younger lacked mature judgment. 
Anyone who is too immature to vote is too immature to choose a 
life partner. There are physical reasons also involved in such a 
decision. The Germans, according to Julius Caesar, ruled that the 
act of reproduction in marriage was not permitted to anyone under 
twenty-one without incurring infamy: and to this he attributed the 
great strength and fine stature of that simple people.

But is it possible to keep from falling in love? It is, if kissing and 
petting are not indulged in, no endearing terms expressed through 
little intimacies, no gifts exchanged, and no confession of love 
made. It's just as simple as all that. Ovid, a writer in ancient times, 
said "Love gives place to business. Attend to business and you will 
be safe."

It is a wise thing to have a few, good, well-founded principles to 
guide you when about to choose a mate. One of those principles 
should be that beauty of face and figure will not be the sole 
motivating factor in your choice. Remember that "you can never 
tell the depth of the well by the length of the handle on the pump." 
A ready smile, a bright mind, a pleasing personality, a courteous 
manner are all more important than a pretty face. All the flaunted 
beauty of certain screen actresses and actors has not served so 
well in keeping them happily married.

To those who are intellectually, physically, vocationally, and 
emotionally mature enough to fall in love, we say emphatically 
that enduring love is ever built on virtue which cannot be seen in 
the other person at once. Long acquaintanceship--one to five 
years--has better prospects than "love at first sight." Above all, we 
remind them that many more qualities than the severely practical 
go into the composition of married life and home building. 
Abstract traits are beautiful and indispensable, but:

     Will the love that you are rich in 
     Build a fire in the kitchen 
     Or the little god of Love turn the spit, spit, spit?

Flour is the chief and most quantitative ingredient in a good cake, 
but flour alone won't make a cake. You also need baking powder, 
salt, sugar, shortening, eggs and milk, a lot of sifting and mixing, a 
smooth batter, and just the right amount of heat. Love is the chief 
ingredient requisite for a happy marriage but not the only one. A 
good many other things go into the making of a happy marriage, 
especially in these modern times with changing attitudes. 
Speaking of recipes, here is an old grandmother's recipe that has a 
lot of wisdom in it:

"When once you have made your selection, let it remain forever 
settled and give your entire thoughts to preparation for domestic 
use. Some wives keep their husbands in pickle, others in hot water. 
Even poor varieties may be made sweet, tender and good by 
garnishing with patience, well sweetened with smiles and flavored 
with kisses. Wrap in a mantle of charity, keep warm with a steady 
fire of domestic devotion. Serve often with peaches and cream. 
When thus prepared, husbands will keep for years."

But getting back to our main topic--love--most readers will agree 
wholeheartedly with what we have stated thus far. There will be 
perfect agreement with the tenet that a person ought to know what 
real love is and be so well grounded in the knowledge that the true 
can be easily detected from the false. Sound advice, all this is, for 
those who have not yet entered holy wedlock, but what about those 
already married who find the fires of love reduced to but 
smoldering embers, if not, as some protest, gone out completely?

To such persons we say that were it not within the power of man to 
"will to love," there would be no solution to such a problem and 
most marriages would rarely remain happy for more than a few 
years at best. That it is not impossible to foster love for one's 
husband or wife is being proven daily by thousands of thoughtful 
men and women who, while disillusioned as to the fitness of their 
match, nevertheless have forced themselves to look for the good 
and noble in each other, with the amazing result that a new 
understanding and respect has grown up between them.

No matter who it is, there is some loveliness in everyone that lurks 
undiscovered, and patient, kindly exploration will render it easily 
discernible and upon this a new comradeship can be born and 
fostered. Always remember that the great bridge that now spans 
Niagara Falls first began with the spreading from side to side of a 
tiny wire. The wire was used to haul across a rope and at the end of 
the rope was a heavy cable, and so on until a bridge was begun 
that today supports the traffic of trains, cars, and honeymooners. 
The point is that someone had to will that a bridge be built across 
Niagara Falls and from that will flowed the determination that 
provided the means for overcoming what appeared at first to be 
insurmountable obstacles. The same holds true in marriage, and 
while one or both parties may not experience all the rapturous 
moments of happiness that they might have had had they chosen 
their life partner more wisely, consider that few marriages are a 
tale of uninterrupted bliss.

That everyone has within him the power "to will to love" is proved 
by the fact that in certain countries, in the past, there was no free 
choices of mates, and yet such a deep sense of the duty of loving 
was taught in the home--and not only a great and high sense of 
duty but the grandeur of loving--that the husband and wife usually 
managed to make a good job of mutually respecting one another. 
So successful was this sort of thing that some wag--Lyttleton or 
Shaftesbury, I think--said: "Marriages would be happier if they 
were all arranged by the Lord Chancellor."

The person who says, "I do not love my wife or my husband any 
more," acknowledges simply that "the will to love" is absent. Such 
a person lacks good sportsmanship too, for a good sport will take 
pride in succeeding in every adventure, and marriage is one of 
life's chief adventures. Morton puts it this way: "In love, as in 
religion, faith worketh miracles."

Whatever you do, give love time. "Love," says Blucher, "is the river 
of life in this world. Think not that ye know it who stand at the 
little tinkling rill, the first small fountain. Not until you have gone 
through the rocky gorges and not lost the stream; not until you 
have gone through the meadow and the stream has widened and 
deepened until fleets could ride on its bosom; not until beyond the 
meadow you have come to the unfathomable ocean, and poured 
your treasures into its depths--not until then can you know what 
love is!"

And the measure of love? Mrs. Browning gave the world a 
wondrous formula:

     How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
     I love thee to the depth and breadth and height 
     My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight 
     For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace. 
     I love thee to the level of everyday's 
     Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight. 
     I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; 
     I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. 
     I love thee with the passion put to use, 
     In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith; 
     I love thee with a love I seemed to lose 
     With my lost saints,--I love thee with the breath, 
     Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose, 
     I shall but love thee better after death.[1]

There is every reason to believe that all the ancient Jewish 
customs were observed at the marriage in Cana. If that be true, Our 
Blessed Lord and His Virgin Mother witnessed a most significant 
reminder of the fragility of love. According to custom, from time 
to time during Jewish wedding feasts, someone would put 
somewhat of a check on the joyous festivities by shattering the 
wine glasses of the happy pair.[2] The idea was to remind the bride 
and the groom that all felicity is subject to instability, and that 
love, like a glass once dashed to the ground, could be shattered 
into a thousand pieces--and were repair possible, the cracks would 
always show.

In this, as in so many other ways, the lessons of Cana are 
tremendous and Cana Is Forever.



ENDNOTES

1. Sonnets from the Portuguese.

2. "Fortuna vitrea est, tum quum splendet frangitur"--Publius 
Syrus--see Berachot F. 31. 1. "The Christ--The Son of God," by the 
Abbe Constant Fouard (I, p. 193).



Chapter Three: REMOTE PREPARATION FOR MARRIAGE

I read somewhere about an old prospector who discovered a gold 
mine which he later sold for more than ten million dollars. The 
story related how the miner came to a certain spot and threw down 
his pick, remarking: "Where my pick falls, I'll dig for gold." What 
the story did not make clear was that it took him forty years to 
find the right spot to throw the pick.

Success that results from mere chance is extremely rare and this is 
doubly true in the matter of matrimony. There are those who, when 
they see a happily wedded couple whose marriage has made them 
eloquent in love, believe it to be solely the result of a lucky 
meeting, a decent courtship, and an adequate period of 
engagement. Believe me, these are but a few of the many 
ingredients that go into the making for happiness and success in 
marriage. But marriage is not nearly as much of a gamble as some 
would have you believe. It does not belong in the lottery class. It is 
definitely an open-and-shut proposition. How marriage turns out is 
the exact working out of cause and effect. What you bring to 
marriage and what your mate brings to marriage will determine its 
success or failure. Therein lies the importance of remote 
preparation.

It is sheer folly to attempt to build a massive superstructure on a 
weak foundation. That was dramatically proved when the Saint 
Francis Dam in Southern California collapsed a few years ago and 
the waters it was built to hold back rushed down the valley, 
causing terrific loss of life and property. Here was a case of faulty 
foundation construction. When a marriage collapses, the blame 
most frequently may be traced to a faulty foundation--a faulty 
remote or long distance preparation.

Being the right kind of person is as important as finding the right 
person to marry. But being the right kind of person depends not 
only upon what you have made of yourself or upon whether the 
influence exerted by other persons and circumstances has been 
good or bad but also upon that with which you began life. When 
Victor Hugo said, "To reform a man, you must begin with his 
grandmother," he enunciated a principle that opens up fields for 
speculation. Naturally, whatever is said here concerning heredity, 
environment, social and moral development, applies equally to the 
one you have already wed or whom you will eventually marry. 
Consideration of these matters when judging yourself or another 
may clear up some of life's complexities.

Your life began with a single cell. That cell divided in two, the two 
cells divided and became four, the four cells divided and became 
eight, the eight became sixteen until as a single individual you 
represent a total of some thirty thousand million or more cells. 
The single cell in the fertilized ovum or egg from which you 
started increased in weight more than seven million times in nine 
months.

More marvelous still is the fact that the single original cell from 
which you began--a cell no bigger than the head of a pin --
contained forty-eight chromosomes each with its genes derived 
partly from your mother and partly from your father--passed on to 
them through the generations--and determining your features, 
traits, and even the color of your eyes. With all this in mind, one is 
confronted with the intricate and staggering force of heredity.

Out of the dim past every child brings a two-fold deposit: an 
ancestral and a racial inheritance. Scientists claim that the 
ancestral inheritance is determined by the individual maternal and 
paternal cells which unite to form one from which the new life 
begins. Mendel explained in his theory of heredity that "the 
offspring is not intermediate in type between its parents but the 
type of one or the other parent is predominant." It is the idea of 
continuity, the steady flow from the past into the future, that 
every married person or anyone contemplating marriage must 
strive to understand, if he or she is to grasp the significance of the 
vastness of the problem of differentiation between one man and 
another and one woman and another and cooperate with it 
intelligently.

Heritable traits are admitted in animals. A brood mare which has 
developed a mean streak or trickiness will be promptly removed 
from the breeding stables by a wise horseman because he knows 
that such traits will show up in the colts. In human beings 
heritable traits are frequently totally discounted. Most authorities 
agree that a normal healthy baby inherits nothing but (1) a fear of 
noise and a fear of falling, (2) a capacity to learn, (3) physical 
characteristics, and (4) a certain glandular mechanism, and they 
drop the matter right there.

Too few of the authorities, I fear, grasp the far-reaching effects 
that good or bad glandular mechanisms play in determining what 
sort of a person we are or become or their effect on our relations 
with others with whom we live. An over-active thyroid gland in a 
pregnant mother may be transmitted to her child, and such a 
transmission will certainly produce nervousness and irritability. 
Who can determine the extent of the effect that such nervousness 
and irritableness will have upon that mother-child relationship and 
upon other relationships?

What has been said of the thyroid gland might be said of the other 
glands. Preponderance of activity or underactivity of even one 
gland will upset the balance of the whole system. All of us have 
seen side-show freaks. They became bearded ladies, giants, 
dwarfs, or fat monstrosities because of defective glands, glands 
that were in many cases transmitted to them from their parents.

There is nearly perfect agreement among geneticists that, (1) close 
relatives should not marry since such individuals draw their genes 
from the same common ancestral sources and there is grave risk 
that defective genes may simply be duplicated and (2) that 
persons not related but whose family records show similar defects 
ought not consider marriage together, since they would bring to 
their union the same trends toward hereditary evils. How well your 
ancestors and mine observed those principles has determined 
what sort of persons we are today.

Not many people stop to realize the profound influence of 
ancestry on their present status. The person who has such soft 
bones as to be crippled or partially incapacitated, the young man 
or woman whose whole life has been influenced and inhibited due 
to unsightly, decaying teeth, most likely can trace these defects to 
a physically incapable or downright careless mother who paid no 
attention to her diet during pregnancy, and so her blood was non-
productive of the calcium and silicon necessary for good bone and 
dental structure. The fault might not even be the mother's, but the 
grandmother's. The ultimate effect of these bad teeth might be to 
alter one's whole personality, close certain professions to that 
person, and generally affect his relations with others. Indeed, 
heredity plays a most important part in one's life. Remember this 
when you come to choose a mate. The prudent choice should be 
made in the light of your own heritable physical make-up and that 
of your mate.

Present-day authorities on genetics have the annoying habit of 
blandly and unequivocally stating with all the finality imaginable 
that every baby starts at zero and comes into the world with no 
heritable traits. They claim that environment alone is to blame for 
what a child turns out to be. Then they qualify this statement. For 
instance, they hold that a child is born into this world with a 
hereditary fear of noise and a fear of falling. If two traits are 
hereditary, why not twenty-two?

Amram Scheinfeld, in his famous book, "You and Heredity,"[1] goes 
to any lengths to disprove hereditary influences, but yet he admits 
that excessive smoking, drinking, or drug addiction may reach the 
unborn baby through the mother and cause harmful and even 
disastrous effects. Heavy drinking, he claims, can cause 
malformation; excessive use of quinine can cause deafness in the 
baby; while addiction to morphine or opium to a point where the 
mother's tissues are saturated with such drugs, may cause the 
baby to come into the world as a drug addict. More amazing still is 
this statement by Scheinfeld--the ardent anti-hereditarian: "From 
the very first instant--we might say even before conception--both 
heredity and environment are at work."

Much has yet to be explained by the scientists before we have a 
complete picture of the matter of physical heritable traits. Can it 
be that our physical side is so plastic that an unborn baby can be 
affected by what enters its mother's mind through her senses? We 
have all heard of disfiguring blemishes and birthmarks that were 
said to have resulted to the unborn baby by its mother having seen 
a frightening object. Medical authorities today reject this as utterly 
untenable.

However, before dismissing such things as physical 
impossibilities, it would be well to read the thirtieth chapter of 
Genesis, beginning at the thirty-second verse. The story found 
therein tells how Jacob, after making an agreement with Laban to 
accept "all the sheep of divers colours and speckled: and all that is 
brown and spotted, and of divers colours, as well among the sheep, 
as among the goats, shall be my wages," proceeded to increase the 
number of spotted and speckled animals by this most ingenious 
method.

"And Jacob took green rods of poplar and of almond, and of plane 
trees, and pilled them in part: so when the bark was taken off, in 
the parts that were pilled, there appeared whiteness: but the parts 
that were whole remained green. And by this means the colour was 
divers. And he put them in the troughs, where the water was 
poured out: that when the flocks should come to drink, they might 
have the rods before their eves, and in the sight of them might 
conceive.

"And it came to pass . . . the sheep beheld the rods and brought 
forth spotted, and divers colours, and speckled." The same process 
worked for the goats too, and the Sacred Writer adds that "the man 
was enriched exceedingly."

Unanswerable as the problem is of whether or not what enters a 
mother's mind through her senses can affect an unborn child and 
alter its physical development, a greater problem is presented if 
we ask whether or not the very thoughts and desires of parents can 
affect the unborn. Yet Dr. H. S. Pomeroy makes this curious 
observation: "For twenty years I have made a study of first-born 
children, and I am satisfied that it is one of the laws of heredity 
that they should resemble the father. The reason for this appears 
to be that in a happy marriage the husband is, during the first 
year, an object of peculiar interest and admiration to the wife: she 
thinks of him rather than herself and her child is patterned after 
the model she has before her. The second child, under favorable 
circumstances, usually resembles the mother, for the reason that, 
having already one child like the father, both parents unite in the 
desire that the second child be like the mother. When the first 
child resembles the mother markedly, it is occasionally difficult to 
account for it, but usually it will be found that the wife is innately 
selfish, intraverted, or was led to think of herself rather than her 
husband."[2]

Dr. Pomeroy, by the way, goes all out for the passing on of 
hereditary traits from parents to child. "It is," he writes, "an 
established fact that the children of drunken parents will furnish a 
much greater percentage of inebriates than will the children of 
temperate ones. It is known that 'love children' are particularly 
difficult to bring up in paths of virtue."

The above has not been included in this essay to supply you with a 
ready answer to someone's dubious query of "How do you get that 
way?", but simply to point up the fact that although one is not 
born with a ready-made personality, many potentialities of one's 
character and personality may possibly have been established 
before birth. You were born with a certain kind of body--thin or fat, 
strong or weak, active or sluggish, insensitive or responsive, and 
those things affected your output of energy, push, indefatigability, 
and these formed the physical foundation to your personality. The 
kind of body you have today is in no small way the result of good 
or bad heredity. Sallust once remarked that "the glory of ancestors 
sheds a light around posterity: it allows neither their good nor bad 
qualities to remain in obscurity."

Be all this as it may, both those who differ on the question of more 
or less potent transmission of heritable traits from one's ancestors 
and those who contend that the human individual starts only with 
the union of sperm and ovum, all agree that every newborn babe is 
a potential saint or sinner, a scoundrel or an ornament to society, a 
joy or a heartache to its parents. What the newborn babe will 
eventually become depends in a great part upon certain external 
forces or factors and upon its own internal mechanisms, plus the 
grace of God and the individual's cooperation with it.

The growth of the human child is divided into three main periods: 
infancy, childhood, and adolescence. From birth to the end of the 
first nine months represents early infancy; and from nine months 
to two years later infancy. From two years to six years we have 
early childhood, while from six to thirteen, later childhood. From 
about thirteen years to sixteen is termed early adolescence, and 
from sixteen years to maturity is called later adolescence. From 
the day an infant is born it requires parents to love, nourish, and 
teach it, and good religious and social environment to give it a 
chance, for human behavior is made and not born. Human beings 
are unbelievably complex things, constantly played upon by 
numerous forces.

So much stress is laid on personality today that one is said to 
succeed with it and to be a failure without it. Certainly, no one is 
born with a definite personality. In fact, you had so little 
individual personality at your birth that had you been accidentally 
mixed up with other newly born infants neither your own father 
nor mother could have pointed you out. Today your mother or 
father could pick you out of ten millions of people. What makes 
you you? Evelyn Duvall and Reuben Hill wrap the answer up very 
neatly in the following quote: "What makes you you depends upon 
years of responding to life's situations. Your personality is made 
up of many things: the kind of body you started with, the type of 
home you were born into, the sort of people you had to associate 
with, the way you have been brought up and the things you have 
learned and, most important of all, how you felt and acted about 
them. Your personality is the sum total of the characteristic ways 
of feeling, responding, and behaving, which determine your place 
in society."[3]

Let us examine some of the above-mentioned influences in detail.

The kind of body with which you started. Having already gone into 
this matter, it suffices here to say that your personality was 
affected by circumstances that even preceded your birth. The very 
way in which you were attached to the womb of your mother had 
something to do with your development. T. Wingate Todd asserts 
that "many low-grade mentalities are not instances of hereditary 
feeble-mindedness but examples of defect in brain development 
induced by mal-nurture during pre-natal and post-natal life.[4] The 
quality and quantity of food, the balanced or unbalanced diet of 
the mother, partial starvation or overfeeding; in short, whether 
your life was one of comfort, of luxury or hardship, made for gross 
differentiation in your personality and profoundly influenced it.

The type of home into which you were born. Your body was your 
primary environment. Your home was your secondary 
environment, and it influenced your present personality in no 
small way. If you were born to a family which dwelt in the country 
you absorbed different ideas about life than you would have, had 
you been born to city folk. Having been born and brought up in a 
squalid tenement section of a large city would have differentiated 
your social influence from a person who was born to a 
multimillionaire's residence on Park Avenue. In a word, you share 
the status of your family's standing in your neighborhood and 
your community. Where you actually dwell is more significant 
than perhaps you think. Would you be surprised if I were to tell 
you that sixty-three per cent of people marry someone who lives 
within eight blocks of where they live? Thus, such a trifling thing 
as where you dwell will have its influence upon whom you marry, 
and where you live once you are married will have its influence 
upon your children. It seems that there is something to what 
Alexander Smith once said: "Trifles make up the happiness or 
misery of mortal life."

How your parents acted toward each other and toward you has had 
a great influence upon your personality development. If your 
parents made a success of their marriage, the chances are good for 
your making a success of yours.

The basis for your marriage has been laid in your own home and 
the example you there absorbed will be the basis of your own 
happiness in that career. It is not pure accident that for 
generations, in certain families, there have been no divorces or 
unhappy marriages. The influence of family background, 
traditions, and ideals is powerful. According to leading 
sociologists, psychologists, clergymen, and others best fitted to 
know, it has been pointed out that there is a close relationship 
between childhood impressions of family life and the achievement 
of married happiness as an adult. The happier the recollections of 
the parents' marriage, the better the chances of happiness in the 
child's subsequent wedlock.

In a revealing article by Barbara Benson in the February, 1947, 
issue of "The Ladies' Home Journal," entitled "Would You Marry 
Your Husband Again?", a new nationwide survey shows that from 
persons whose marriage turned out better than they expected, 
fifty-seven per cent say their parents' marriages were very happy, 
too. In contrast, among the people whose marriage has been a 
disappointment, only one in three (thirty-six per cent) recalls his 
parents' marriage as a happy one. Note the evidence of the power 
of example! This indicates, too, that care should be taken to avoid 
marrying a person whose parents failed in marriage. The cards are 
stacked against you!

Such a trifling thing as the memory of a mother, on the one hand, 
loving her home and enjoying her role as housekeeper, or the 
memory of a mother, on the other hand, who constantly protested 
and groaned about the slavery of housekeeping, may spell the 
difference between your liking or despising housekeeping and be 
the cause of your present urge to be a career woman.

Your personality has been affected for good or for evil by the 
differences in familial relationships. Psychologists now all agree 
that the feeling of being wanted, being loved, and having a place 
in your own world constituted a fundamental need in your life 
even from infancy. Perhaps I can best explain this with an 
example. Some years ago a father and mother came to me 
regarding what they termed their problem boy, Dore, an eighteen-
year-old son, who had become defiant, sulky, uncompanionable. 
The boy had no interest in sports and just wanted to be left alone.

As the parents told their story, the reason for their son's strange 
behavior became evident. When their son was born they wanted a 
girl, and they could not conceal their disappointment. From the 
very beginning they began to treat him as if he were a girl. They 
chose a name as nearly feminine as possible. The gentlest 
companions were picked for him and rough games were roundly 
discouraged.

Naturally, at eighteen, Dore did not fit into sports, and in an 
endeavor to give himself something in the way of toughness, he 
developed the habit of vile language and of drinking. The defiance 
of parental direction and authority was a natural result of this 
attempt to gain an appearance of manhood.

Dore's parents were taken aback when I pointed out that they and 
they alone were responsible for what they termed their "problem 
child." He was simply an example of what happens when the 
feeling of not being wanted is present in a child's mind and heart.

The way you have been brought up. Every child is a very complex 
human being. Hence the problems of development are by no 
means simple. Every infant born into the world is a bundle of 
potentialities, and how the various potentialities will develop 
depends to a large extent upon environmental factors--in the 
child's case these are largely the personalities with whom he 
comes in contact. "During infancy," says Mary E. Spencer, Ph.D., 
"and the pre-school years, the patterns of development are well 
outlined. The foundation of what the child will become has already 
been laid. This ground structure may evidence careful planning 
and well-defined outlines. Or it may have been built hit or miss, 
with supports too weak to carry a superstructure of any lasting 
value. Or the masonry may be very shoddy, giving evidences of 
poor workmanship, as we review the foundation work on which the 
later personality and character building are to rest." This line of 
reasoning seems to be borne out by the following story.

Some time ago a New York Sunday paper ran a full-page story 
concerning a sensitive plant which would respond to the most 
delicate outside movement. The article was strikingly entitled 
"Even a Good Holler Scares These Sensitive Plants." The author 
pointed out that the rumble of a passing automobile or a gust of 
wind or the heat from a match would cause the small light blue 
flower to collapse. Luther Burbank was cognizant of this, too. He 
claimed that all plants were sensitive and would become 
unconscious in the presence of ether. He would never hire a man 
who used alcohol or who smoked because plants were affected by 
the odor of both alcohol and tobacco.

Never did the great horticulturist discuss the delicate nature of 
plants without asserting that while they responded to the most 
delicate outside influences, a child was infinitely more sensitive. 
"A child," Burbank would say, "is as sensitive to outside influences 
and forces as a seismograph is sensitive to an earthquake which is 
ten thousand miles away."[5]

Some authorities maintain that a tiny infant is influenced by angry 
and bitter talk indulged in by its parents in its presence. A baby in 
its mother's arms is said to acquire a lasting fear of lightning, 
simply by feeling the trembling of the mother as she clasps the 
little one to her breast. Baseless fears resulting from feelings of 
suffocation, or pains and clutching sensations suffered in adult 
life, have been traced back to times in early childhood when the 
senseless punishment of being locked in a closet was administered 
by an irate parent. Do you understand now what I mean when I say 
that external forces contrive to make each of us what we are? 
Those good or bad forces will make us good or bad risks in 
marriage years hence.

The delaying of the development of self-reliance likewise can be 
destructive of essential character formation. While it is true that 
the human child has the longest term of infancy of any living 
creature, nevertheless it must gradually be taught to acquire 
independence if it is to develop normally. Much damage is done to 
the child in its early formative years by the faith parents have in 
their protective powers over their offspring and the tendency from 
force of habit to think of them as much more immature than they 
are. This robs the child of the opportunity to take care of itself and 
of the enjoyment of assuming responsibilities.

Catherine Cox Miles, Yale psychologist, states: "There is nothing 
more important we can do for children than give them all the 
responsibility their shoulders can bear. As a result, in manhood 
and womanhood, whether they are building a building, running a 
farm or business, becoming president of a club, leading a 
community drive, editing a magazine, inventing an engine, writing 
a book, or managing their marriage, home, and children, they will 
be able to handle the responsibilities of these jobs from the sheer 
momentum of habit."

The things you learned, how you felt about them and reacted to 
them. Educational experiences are among the strongest 
environmental influences affecting one's life. What you are or will 
be depends in no small way on how you were trained and what you 
were taught. Samuel Johnson once wrote: "Every man is a worse 
man in proportion as he is unfit for the married state," and no 
person is fit to marry who lacks a good sound intellectual, social, 
moral, and religious training.

Pope Pius XI, in his famous Encyclical letter, "On Christian 
Marriage," stresses the importance of a long-range moral 
preparation for matrimony in the following words:

"For it cannot be denied that the basis of a happy wedlock, and the 
ruin of an unhappy one, is prepared and set in the souls of boys 
and girls during the period of childhood and adolescence. There is 
danger that those who before marriage sought in all things what is 
theirs, will be in the married state what they were before, that they 
will reap what they have sown; indeed, within the homes there will 
be sadness, lamentation, mutual contempt, strifes, estrangements, 
weariness of common life, and worst of all, such parties will find 
themselves left alone with their own unconquered passions."

From the Pontiff's words it is obvious that one who has acquired 
and practiced the Seven Great Virtues of Faith, Hope, Charity, 
Temperance, Prudence, Fortitude, and Justice, and the Ten Little 
Natural Moral Virtues of Tact, Order, Courtesy, Punctuality, 
Sincerity, Unbiased Judgment, the Good Use of Time, 
Cheerfulness, Loyalty, and Caution in Speech, will certainly make a 
success of the matrimonial career. On the other hand, what 
marriage could be happy where one or both of the mates bring to 
their union souls steeped in habits resulting from frequent 
commissions of the Seven Deadly or Capital Sins--namely, Pride, 
Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, and Sloth? The scale of 
marital happiness tips toward that in which one's soul inclines.

Need we stress the well-known fact that a person will be after 
marriage what he was before it? For instance, a young man who 
was inordinately proud as a child and teen-ager will most certainly 
be an arrogant and domineering husband, for pride is not founded 
on the sense of happiness but on the sense of power. "Unwarranted 
pride," as Johnson puts it, "is seldom delicate. It will please itself 
with very mean advantages." What is true of sinful pride is true of 
all the other Capital Sins. What chance for happiness has a girl who 
marries a drunkard or one whose temper is uncontrollable? Pope 
Pius XI, as noted before, warns against marrying one whose 
weakness is lust, for he said: "There is danger that those who 
before marriage indulged their impure desires, will be in marriage 
what they were before and they will reap what they have sown . . . 
worst of all such parties will find themselves left alone with their 
own unconquered passions."

A survey made several years ago of the real causes of 
unhappiness, separations, and civil divorces is most revealing. I 
say real causes, because in most cases the excuses given in the 
courts are not the real causes at all but the required legal grounds 
for civil suits. Here follows the list of the true causes of 
unhappiness or failure in marriage:

On the part of the wife:
     Extravagance 
     Dirty--untidy home
     Unattractive person 
     Accepting attention of other men or outright infidelity 
     Resentment of father's discipline of children 
     Too much time spent with mother
     Accepting advice of neighbors 
     Nagging or disparaging the husband 
     Indifference to the husband 
     Not being tactful or feminine 
     Drunkenness 

On the part of the husband: 
     Stinginess 
     Interference in household management 
     Gloominess 
     Lack of consideration 
     Lack of love-making and kindness 
     Living with relations 
     Drunkenness 
     Vulgarity or slovenly habits 
     Infidelity 
     Laziness 

It would be interesting and worth while to write in alongside each 
of these items the deadly sins that caused it or the different 
virtues it violates. For instance, laziness is the result of the sin of 
sloth; and drunkenness the sin of gluttony and the lack of the 
virtue of temperance. Such an exercise will make the poet's lines 
more understandable.

     We make the world we live in: and we weave 
     About us webs of good or ill, which leave 
     Their impress on our souls.

Strength or weakness of will, its training or the lack of it, may spell 
the difference between being a good marriage risk or a bad one. 
Pope Pius XI, in his great Encyclical letter "On Education," wisely 
stated that:

"The inclinations of the will, if they are bad, must be repressed 
from childhood, but such as are good must be fostered, and the 
mind, particularly of children, should be imbued with doctrines 
which begin with God, while the heart should be strengthened with 
the aids of Divine grace, in the absence of which none can curb 
their evil desires, nor can their discipline and formation be 
brought to complete perfection by the Church, which Christ has so 
provided with heavenly doctrines and Divine Sacraments, as to 
make her an effectual teacher of men."

There is no gainsaying the fact that there is a vast difference 
between what you could have learned and what you did learn, and 
a vast difference between how you were trained and how you could 
have been trained--between what you are today and what you 
could or can be. While it is true that you are the product of your 
environment, nevertheless if your parents were remiss, you don't 
have to remain a sensitive, anti-social, immoral, frightened, 
irreligious, or nervous person. As the Chinese say, "You can't stop 
the birds from flying overhead but you can prevent them from 
building their nests in your hair." You can force yourself to 
change. You can learn new things and form new and better habits. 
There is no limit to what determination, love, and the grace of God 
can do.

The kind of marriage you make depends on the kind of person you 
are and the kind of person your mate is. The success or failure of 
your marriage will depend in a large measure on what each one of 
you brings to that union. What each of you brings to marriage 
likewise depends on the kind of remote preparation each has made 
for wedlock. Regarding this foundation,

     "Build it well, whate'er you do; 
     Build it straight and strong and true; 
     Build it clean and high and broad; 
     Build it for the eye of God."

When Our Lord went to Cana for the marriage feast, it is assumed 
that He arrived in time for the great procession which formed such 
a colorful and important part of the ceremony. According to 
custom, the marriage procession always began late on Tuesday 
night and was made up of a troop of singers, their voices mingling 
with the notes of the flute and the clash of tambourines, with, last 
of all, the bridegroom, gloriously clad, his forehead wreathed with 
a golden turban entwined with myrtle and roses. About him 
marched his ten friends called "sons of the groom," holding palm 
branches in their hands while the kinsmen acting as his escort 
bore lighted torches. Arriving at the home of the bride, the 
bridegroom and his companions entered within and, taking her by 
the hand, escorted her to the threshold, there to receive the tablet 
of stone on which was inscribed the dowry. This done, the whole 
party left for the home of the bridegroom.

At Cana, as in every ancient Jewish marriage, the receiving of the 
tablets of stone on which were inscribed the dowry formed an 
important part of the wedding. The dowry still forms an important 
part of every wedding--for Cana is forever. Today both the bride 
and groom bring a dowry to their marriage--a dowry made up of 
two individual personalities, each with its own particular history 
and background. Each dowry is made up of the sum total of good 
or bad environmental influences, good or bad habits, good or bad 
ideals, good or bad fundamental moral principles, good or bad 
religious background, or, in a word, the good or bad remote 
preparation for marriage.

     By trifles in our common ways, 
     Our characters are slowly piled, 
     We lose not all our yesterdays; 
     The man has something of the child. 
     Part of the past to all the present cleaves, 
     As the rose-odors linger in the fading leaves.

     In ceaseless toil, from year to year, 
     Working with loath or willing hands, 
     Stone upon stone we shape, we rear, 
     Till the completed fabric stands, 
     And when the hush hath all labor stilled, 
     The searching fire will try what we have striven to build....[6]



ENDNOTES

1. Philadelphia, Pa.: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1939.

2. "The Ethics of Marriage," p. 114. New York: Funk and Wagnalls 
Co., 1888.

3. "When You Marry," Evelyn Millis Duvall and Reuben Hill, p. 4. 
New York: Association Press, 1945.

4. "Growth and Development," T. Wingate Todd. Cleveland: Brush 
Foundation Publications, 1930.

5. "More Stories in Sermons," William L. Stidger, p. 101. New York: 
Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1944.

6. "The Building of Character," J. R. Miller, D.D. New York: Thomas 
Y. Crowell Co., 1894.



Chapter Four: PROXIMATE PREPARATION FOR MARRIAGE

"Choose your horse from a hundred, your friend from a thousand, 
and your wife from ten thousand." That is an Arabian proverb, and 
it is startling in its blunt annunciation of a patent truth. The 
choice of a life partner in marriage is a great and grave 
responsibility. It obligates one to love and serve another, to rear 
children and govern them, and, at the same time, to serve God with 
one's whole heart and soul and mind--works any one of which 
alone requires great faith and perseverance, and which, taken 
together, cannot be accomplished without special aid from 
Heaven.

To choose a life mate for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in 
sickness and in health until his or her death, is obviously a task 
that requires sane and sage judgment. So much depends on the 
right choice that a prayerful proximate preparation is imperative. 
Upon the choice of a husband or a wife depends happiness or 
bitter regrets during this life and even heaven or hell in the next.

Important as the remote preparation for marriage is, the proximate 
preparation is vastly more important, since it must serve as a 
novitiate for wedded life. Speaking of novitiate, I am reminded of 
the words of St. Francis de Sales, who said: "Marriage is an order 
where the profession is made before the novitiate," and then he 
adds this startling observation: "But if there was a year of trial or 
testing as is required before the profession of vows in 
monasteries, few would be professed."

St. Francis de Sales' observation has been borne out by a recent 
nation-wide survey made by a great American woman's magazine. 
The interviewers talked to a cross section of the country's married 
adults and found out that one married person in five doubted he or 
she chose the right partner and stated they would choose 
differently if given a second chance.

The importance of making a correct choice is stressed in Holy 
Scripture. Here are but a few salient quotations:

"Happy is the husband of a good wife, for the number of his years 
is double."

"A virtuous woman rejoices her husband; and he shall fulfill the 
years of his life in peace."

"It will be more agreeable to abide with a lion and a dragon than to 
dwell with a wicked woman."

"As the climbing of a sandy way is to the feet of the aged, so is a 
wife full of tongue to a quiet man."

"Roofs dropping through on a cold day, and a contentious woman, 
are alike."

Few readers will have experienced the calamity of having a roof 
fall in on them on a cold day, but I feel that the married reader of 
this page who steals a look across the room at the face of a 
belligerent wife, or at a sullen, gloomy husband whose face 
constantly bears the grieved look of an untipped waiter, will 
readily understand what the Holy Ghost had in mind.

Broken hearts and homes would be the rare exception if more 
serious thought was given to this matter of preparedness for 
wedlock. An adequate proximate preparation for marriage 
demands:

(1) A healthy moral and social teen-age development
(2) Physical, intellectual, emotional, and vocational maturity
(3) Prudence in choosing a potential mate
(4) Persevering prayer for guidance
(5) Parental counsel
(6) Consultation with your pastor or confessor
(7) A proper period of engagement

Some may wonder at the inclusion of teen-age development 
problems in a chapter dealing with proximate preparation for 
marriage, and the point is well taken until one considers that it is 
during the teen-age that many friendships are formed from which 
love and marriage later result. Again, since many of the virtues 
and vices acquired in the teen-age period find their way into 
marriage as good or evil habits, it can be readily seen that the 
teen-age can truly be said to be a part of the proximate preparation 
for marriage and the venture may succeed or fail according to 
what is blended in the joint alchemy of "keeping company."

     A healthy moral and social teen-age development

Morality may be defined as "human conduct in so far as it is freely 
subordinated to the ideal of what is right and fitting," and the 
Church has always maintained that morality and religion are 
essentially connected. She contends that without religion the 
observance of the moral law is impossible. For this reason Holy 
Mother Church states that certain conditions are required for the 
growth and development of morality in the individual and the 
community, namely: (1) a right education of the young, (2) a 
healthy public opinion, and (3) sound legislation. Since we are 
primarily concerned here with right education of the young as it 
concerns morality, let us endeavor to find out what constitutes a 
solid basis for such an education.

According to the mind of Holy Mother Church, right education of 
the young includes the early training in the home as well as the 
subsequent years of school and college life. The family is the true 
school of morality and its good or bad effects will remain with one 
during the whole of life. It is in the home that we learn obedience, 
truthfulness, purity, and self-restraint and the other primary 
virtues. The Church also maintains that the best scholastic 
education is the one that is given in a moral and religious 
atmosphere. Morality and religion go hand in hand. Mark Hopkins 
once remarked that "Everywhere the tendency has been to separate 
religion from morality, to set them in opposition even. But religion 
without morality is a superstition and a curse; and anything like 
adequate and complete morality without religion is impossible. 
The only salvation for man is in the union of the two as 
Christianity unites them."[1] Father Joseph Roux, in Meditations of a 
Parish Priest, remarks that "morality is the fruit of religion: to 
desire morality without religion is to desire an orange without an 
orange tree." To the above we simply add the warning that morality 
will be terribly difficult for the person who does not pray.

Two persons who want to find success and happiness in the 
marriage career must bring to their marriage a healthy moral 
development founded on the teachings of the one true religion. G. 
A. Coe, writing in "Education in Religion and Morality,"[2] states that 
"the capacity for love between persons of the opposite sex, the 
beginning of which is the central fact of adolescent psychology, is 
usually treated as a matter of indifference to religion or else as a 
positive hindrance to spiritual development. Yet the worst evils 
are always perversions of the best goods. The higher sentiments 
that cluster about the relation of the sexes are, in their normal 
development, precisely the ones that constitute a spiritual as 
distinguished from an unspiritual life. The great unselfishness 
that knows no life except through losing its life is not an 
experience of childhood; it awaits adolescence, and it is an 
upshoot of our capacity for devoted love to a person of the 
opposite sex. So, also, it is love that refines away the grossness of 
our nature. It spreads through the life of lovers and is 
communicated to the whole of society."

From this quotation the reader may grasp something of the 
importance of what we have listed as a prime requisite for a 
healthy moral development--namely, the good moral education in 
the home or a good Catholic education in the school. Religion as a 
basis for morality is essential for good living. It was Jung, the 
psychiatrist, who said: "Among all my patients, there has not been 
one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a 
religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them 
fell ill because he had lost that which the living religion of every 
age has given to its followers, and none of them has been really 
healed who did not regain his religious outlook."[3]

All we have stated so far may be resolved into the following 
sentences:

     Love, honor, obey and respect your parents. 
     Attend Catholic schools.
     Learn your religion. 
     Frequent the sacraments.
     Avoid the company of those without faith or those who 
criticize or scoff at religion. Base your morality on the teachings of 
the Church.

Before quitting this topic of morality, I feel I should say a few 
words on good manners, for good manners are nothing less than 
little morals. If not virtues themselves, they are shadows of 
virtues. Burke once said that "Manners are of more importance 
than laws. According to this quality, they aid morals, they supply 
laws, or they totally destroy them."

But what are good manners? One aspect is the art of putting others 
at their ease. The person who makes the fewest persons 
uncomfortable is the best-mannered. It is worthy of note that ill 
manners spring from vanity, ill-nature, want of sympathy, and 
want of common sense. Avoid the pitfall of being unmannerly 
yourself and above all avoid the company of a person who is ill-
mannered.

     Manners are not idle, but the fruit 
     noble nature and of loyal mind.

I once read that "he is an ill-mannered man who is always loud in 
the praise of himself or his family; who, boasting of his rank, of 
his business, of his achievements in his calling, looks down upon 
lower orders of people; who cannot refrain from having his joke at 
the expense of another's character; who tries always to say the 
smart and cutting thing." That is not a bad observation and might 
be used as a yardstick to measure your own manners or the 
manners of others. Take care, however, not to confuse etiquette 
with good manners. The former is quite arbitrary, varies in 
different ages and places and, very often, is absurd; whereas good 
manners, founded as they are on common sense, are universally 
the same.

So much for morals (and manners). Let us turn our attention to the 
problem of social development. In this matter we shall confine our 
remarks to those things that promote a normal development of 
human love and to whatever prevents or degrades it.

We have already noted that every child passes through five 
definite stages on its way from the narcissistic tendency of self-
worship to a covert interest in persons of the opposite sex. 
Psychiatrists term the last stage heterosexuality, which, along with 
gradual liberation from parental domination and preparation for a 
life career, make up the triune tasks of adolescence.

Heterosexuality is usually completed when the child reaches the 
age of fourteen or fifteen but there is no hard and fast rule 
concerning the exact age. With some it may come earlier and with 
others later. The important thing is that when the adolescent first 
feels the desire to seek the company of persons of the opposite 
sex, he must be aided by parental help and sympathy. Any parent 
who throws an iron curtain around a son or daughter in a 
shortsighted, selfish attempt to protect him, rather than to educate 
him for living, does more harm than good. Remember, the little 
boy of five who ran to his mother for protection from a belligerent 
female of four will suffer if the same sort of protection is forced 
upon him at sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen. His Catholic 
education, his frequentation of the Sacraments, his moral 
development should help him to stand on his own feet during his 
social development. This does not mean that youths should be 
turned loose with no supervision and no notice taken of the 
company they keep or the hours they come in at night. Far from it. 
It means simply that new and more advanced methods of 
achieving protection must be used in place of those employed 
when the child was of preschool or grammar-school age.

The moral development must be continued by all means with 
renewed zest during adolescence, for this is the very time in the 
youth's life when he or she is given to brooding Over religious 
misgivings. Such doubts and difficulties must be met with deep 
sympathy, patience, and frankness. The penny catechism method 
of question and answer must give way to meaningful concepts of 
sound moral and dogmatic essentials. Generalized religious 
teachings will be adequate for children up to teen-age, but from 
then on a specialized instruction is required if the adolescent is 
going to carry into adult life a knowledge of what is right and what 
is wrong and the development of the desire and determination to 
do right.

When adolescents begin high school it is time for them to know all 
the pitfalls and dangers of this period of life and the inadvisability 
of allowing their affections to be settled upon any one particular 
person. Should particular friendships develop at this time an 
interesting and distracting program of activities ought to be 
engaged in to divert attention, such as basketball games, tennis, 
handball, excursions, picnics, fishing, hunting, or photography.

The last two years in high school are particularly dangerous years. 
These might be termed the puppy-love years. Undue anxiety and 
opposition during this period then may do more harm than good. It 
is much more sensible to endeavor to launch the teen-age boy or 
girl into proper social contacts with those of the opposite sex.

The symptoms of the development of the romantic urge are 
usually quite obvious. When a boy starts to wash up to his wrists 
and down to his collar line, shines his shoes, and starts polishing 
down his hair with machine oil, it's happening. When a teen-age 
girl raids mother's lipstick and cold creams, stands staring into a 
looking-glass, finds the furniture old-fashioned and father more 
so, the battle is on.

Fortunate were you beyond estimation if Providence gave you 
understanding and intelligent parents--parents who were wise 
enough to help in your social development rather than hinder it. 
Had your parents "kidded" about your first dates, two unhealthy 
conditions might have resulted: their attitude might have made 
you crawl back into a shell or made you defiant and rebellious. 
Equally great damage could have been done you had your parents 
been, on the other hand, too anxious to force your social 
development.

Katherine W. Taylor notes the following factors as interfering with 
one's achievement of good social development: "Homes lacking in 
affection, homes deviating too widely in cultural levels, failure on 
the part of girls to be modishly attractive, and on the part of boys 
to grow rapidly enough for successful participation in sports."[4] It 
is noteworthy that favorable social adjustment follows a more or 
less set pattern. Generally, one starts out with a "yen" to belong to 
a club, gang, or group, and then, gradually, a close and intimate 
association with one person is substituted. As the capacity for love 
develops and matures, the desire for single dating appears and the 
desire to "go steady" with a very special friend develops. These 
first attachments are usually not very permanent, but they play an 
important part in one's development.

Modern adolescents need not take too seriously the charge that 
they are a lost generation. The oldsters of every age have thought 
their youths were the worst ever. A cuneiform fragment found in 
the ruins of Babylon bears this ever ancient, ever new comment: 
"Alas! Alas! times are not what they used to be."[5]

A certain lady writing in 1817 about the youths of her day said: 
"Nothing like the young people of today has ever been seen. They 
make one's hair stand on end. They have neither manners nor 
morals."[6]

Today, we hear tirades about the apparent insanity of our bobby-
soxers and their overwrought hero worship. But every age has had 
a swoon-gang! Franz Liszt, the piano virtuoso, was the Frank 
Sinatra, the Van Johnson of his day. Women and girls went to his 
concerts equipped with knives and scissors so that they could rush 
onto the stage and snip off a lock of his hair. Even the water in 
which he washed his hands was bottled and sold to admirers. His 
cigar butts were worn as prized lockets.

"Humanity," says Donn Piatt, "is about the same the world over--the 
same in every age; and while the earth has its uniformity, with 
slight differences in mountain and plain, so its products are very 
nearly alike."

Accepting the fact that our age presents new problems to youth, 
granting that our generation has more than its share of problem 
children and even bad boys and girls, this much must be stated 
clearly and definitely-that the adolescents who go wrong are 
usually the ones who are seeking the love they have been denied 
at home or are those who have not been conditioned for right 
living.

Here are some timely and important directives to teen-agers. Every 
youth should have a rigid code of rules if he or she would blossom 
into a mature person capable of selective choice of a life mate.

Girls should not cheapen themselves by engaging in a 
conversation with a boy who is so uncouth as to think a two-toned 
whistle or a "Hiya, babe!" constitutes an introduction. The boy who 
stands by the school fence ogling girls as they pass is not worth 
knowing.

Don't accept a lift in a car from a stranger, no matter how movie-
actor-like he looks. Be constant in this. Say "no" and mean it. Girls 
who can be picked up by strangers are usually "just pick-ups" and 
will be treated as such.

Don't "hang around" the usual city or small town haunts. When you 
go out, have some definite place to go. Don't dress as if you did it 
just to attract attention. Too much make-up, too daring clothes, no 
place to go and nothing to do but stand or sit around somebody's 
"sugar-bowl" or hot dog stand, will mark you as a "fast, stupid 
dame."

Girls should avoid the companionship of boys who tell smutty 
stories or who blaspheme. A person who does not respect your 
company will not respect your moral principles. A girl I knew was 
with a group when a smutty story was started. "If you'll excuse me, 
I'll go home," she said. "I would step around a puddle so as not to 
get my feet dirty, and I like to take the same care of my mind." I 
was impressed no end.

Beware of the boy or girl who must have a drink to achieve the 
mood. The sought-after teen-ager is the one who dares to be 
different, and it is during your first dates that you must keep your 
wits about you and look forward to the time when you will have to 
make a final decision about a mate. Courage and a plain coke will 
do more to make you sought after than all the giggle water in the 
world. The girl who needs a highball to bring her out of her shell is 
a poor bet for an interesting companionship. Remember always: 
The teenager who drinks is a boy or girl who lacks the courage to be 
different. Write that in your diary and make it a guiding principle 
throughout your whole life.

Teen-agers, as we said before, ought to exert every effort to keep 
from falling in love with anyone. Wait until you are twenty-one for 
that. You will have a whole new set of guiding principles at that 
age. Buzz around and meet new friends--be ladylike or be a 
gentleman, as the case may be, and enjoy youth as God intended it 
to be enjoyed. How true is the saying: "Youth is such a wonderful 
thing it is a shame to waste it on youth." Don't waste yours!

Above all, be careful of the amorous companion. Teen-age kissing, 
petting, necking or love-making is dangerous and should be a 
warning signal to give such a companion the brush-off. Such 
things show definitely that the instigator of amorous 
demonstrations is emotionally immature and that he or she is 
selfish and weak-willed. The teen-age "necker" is well on the way to 
becoming a Kinsey Report statistic. Love knocks less often at a 
door that is wide open.

One of the most rational and striking articles I ever read on petting 
appeared in the December, 1947, issue of "Your Life,"[7] entitled 
"Public Petting Wastes Romance," and written by Miriam Allen De 
Ford. After denouncing the prevalent habit of public petting in 
parks, cars, and theaters, the author states that "such intimate 
contacts in public often inflame passions which demand quick 
satisfaction in private. Secondly, they stir up sleeping dogs of 
desire in the onlooker. And thirdly, it is always open season on a 
girl who thinks so little of appearances and reputation as to be 
guilty of flaunting her love life so openly."

Moreover, since so many young people have no home where they 
can do their courting, it often leads to serious frustration and 
nervous tension, which is the stuff of which neuroses are made.

Miss De Ford then referred to the great physical dangers that result 
from any sort of amorous kissing on the part of teen-agers (and 
unmarried adults). Speaking of the great epidemic of "unsolved 
murders in which women and girls--by no means always women of 
bad repute--have been found horribly beaten and mutilated, the 
girl who permits and participates in 'necking' anywhere and 
everywhere, without regard to self-control or the standards of 
civilized society, and then suddenly attempts to draw the line and 
dam off the forces she has aroused, may find herself in terrible 
peril."

"One of the worst aspects of this practice," concludes Miss De 
Ford, "is the effect it has on the very young, both by precocious 
stimulation, and by spreading the belief that it is necessary for 
them to allow it in order to be 'popular.' When mere children 
become convinced that companionship with children of the 
opposite sex implies promiscuous endearments, they are lighting a 
fire in which they will be burnt out long before their real season of 
love-making has arrived." The moral side of this question will be 
treated later in this chapter.

Let us now turn our attention to the important consideration of the 
four maturities demanded of those who would begin serious 
company-keeping with a view to subsequent marriage--namely, 
physical maturity, intellectual maturity, emotional maturity, and 
vocational maturity.


Physical maturity

When we speak of physical maturity in relation to marriage, we 
speak of the obvious. Exhaustive comment on this topic is 
definitely unnecessary. All know that the period in life at which a 
person of either sex becomes functionally capable of germination 
is called puberty. It is equally common knowledge that 
pubescence usually is achieved in girls at twelve and in boys 
around fourteen and that whenever it does arrive, the sensory 
stimuli scream for attention. What not a few individuals fail to 
realize is that how these stimuli are met and held in check will 
play an important part in future behavior.

Many a romance has been doomed to failure from its inception by 
a suitor who failed to make the will rule the physical. The swelling 
river, so long as it is made to flow in its appointed channel within 
its own banks, can have its rushing waters harnessed so as to be a 
source of benefit and power to mankind. When the river overflows 
its banks and floods the surrounding land, it can bring death in its 
wake. So, too, with the physical stimuli of man. Harnessed, they 
can be real sources of power, but let run rampant they can cause 
sorrow and regret, and can destroy reputations and souls.

Remember that while puberty is usually reached at between twelve 
and fourteen, the development is not completed until one is 
twenty-one. It is a progressive affair and takes time. Above all, 
nature must not be tampered with. Bad habits acquired in junior or 
senior high school years may carry over into marriage and may 
even rob marriage of the complete physical satisfaction the 
innocent mate has a right to expect.

Nature punishes always, and pardons never, when her laws are 
violated or disregarded. Dr. James Foster Scott, writing on the 
subject of the solitary vice, says that "it produces its own train of 
personal neuroses, diseases and degenerations, injuring the soul, 
the character, perverting the instincts, ruining the nervous system 
and by striking at the very foundations from whence love comes, it 
unfits the victim for the high functions of marriage. It is a 'furious 
task-master,' universally berated, and its perpetrator is universally 
despised."

Modern psychiatrists believe that the solitary vice is an expression 
of a fixation on self and thus is a narcissus complex. Self-abuse, 
when it becomes a deep-rooted habit, may render one incapable of 
heterosexual love and thus must be regarded as pathological.

Before quitting this topic of physical maturity it might not be 
amiss to point out that good health in both partners ought to be an 
important concern. Persons suffering from active tuberculosis, 
chronic and serious heart conditions, brain and nervous ailments 
as well as kidney disorders and diabetes, ought to seek the advice 
of their doctor before attempting marriage.

Above all, these matters ought to be talked over by the interested 
principals. It would be criminal for a person afflicted with a 
communicable sex disease to marry because of the serious 
injustice to the other party. A confessor would be obliged to refuse 
absolution to a penitent determined to contract a marriage under 
such circumstances. A cure, if possible, must be effected before 
the marriage, or the disease must be made known to the other 
party. However, if one must choose between a leper with high 
moral principles and deep faith, and a shop-worn Miss America, or 
a muscle-bound Adonis without faith or morals, I'd say, take the 
leper.


Intellectual maturity

Intellectual development must also be attained along with the 
physical development as a required condition for a good 
proximate preparation for marriage. The eminent scholar and 
author, the Reverend Edward Leen,[8] defines education--that is, 
Christian education--as "that culture of the mind, the will and the 
emotions, which, whilst adapting a man for the exercise of a 
particular calling, disposes him to achieve an excellent personal 
and social life within the framework of that calling." In other 
words, he defines the object of education as nothing else than 
human happiness. Van Dyke expresses nearly the same idea in his 
definition of education, for he says: "Education is to create men 
who can see clearly, image vividly, think steadily, and will 
nobly."[9] God help the young man or woman who thinks of 
marriage without being able to see clearly, image vividly, think 
steadily, and will nobly!

"The human soul," says Ruskin, "in youth, is not a machine of 
which you can polish the cogs with any kelp or brickdust near at 
hand. The whole period of youth is one essentially of formation, 
edification, instruction; intaking of stores, establishment in vital 
habits, hopes and faiths. There is not an hour of it but is trembling 
with destiny."

His Holiness Pope Pius XI, in his great Encyclical letter "Divine 
Illius," writes these important words: "When literary, social and 
domestic education do not go hand in hand, man is unhappy and 
helpless."

The foregoing quotations will but strengthen the claim we make 
for the importance of intellectual development and maturity as a 
basis for a happy marriage. "The discipline by which it is gained, 
and the tastes which it forms," says Newman, "have a natural 
tendency to refine the mind and to give it an indisposition, nay 
more than this, a disgust and abhorrence, towards excesses and 
enormities of evil, which are often or ordinarily reached at length 
by those who are not careful from the first to set themselves 
against what is vicious and criminal. It generates within the mind a 
fastidiousness, analogous to delicacy, generally lively enough to 
create a loathing of certain offences or a detestation and scorn of 
them as ungentlemanlike, to which ruder natures are tempted or 
even betrayed." It is noteworthy that Cardinal Newman was 
speaking of Catholic educational development, for always 
remember that Basil and Julian were fellow students at the Schools 
of Athens; one became the Saint and Doctor of the Church, the 
other her scorning and relentless foe.

The better the intellectual development, the better chance there is 
for happiness in marriage. The more Catholic is that intellectual 
development the more hope there is for holiness and happiness in 
marriage. Remember this when you come to make the choice of a 
mate!


Emotional maturity

Let us consider another and a most important requisite for 
happiness in marriage: emotional maturity. Emotion has the same 
physical basis as a mental reaction but the primary end of emotion 
is to move. For instance, a person who is hungry will be moved to 
steal something to eat; a person who is afraid will be moved to 
shout his lungs out or run like a rabbit. The examples of emotional 
stimuli I have mentioned list but two of the four primary emotions, 
namely hunger and fear, while the other two are rage and pain. All 
other emotions are offshoots of these four; e.g., anxiety, worry, 
sorrow, admiration, scorn, revenge, shame, envy, reproach, and a 
multitude of others. Without emotions you would be a moron; with 
an overdose of emotion you are a social misfit, an abnormal 
member of society.

Control of emotions, mastery of emotions, is a very important part 
of the training for living. Without control emotions can, if allowed 
to run rampant, bring on a neurosis, ulcers of the stomach, or can 
even lead to a prison cell. Anger, for instance, can move one man 
to use harsh words, another man to strike his wife, and yet another 
man to kill. Which of these three would you say had the most 
control and which man most lacked control? Nothing is more 
destructive of marital bliss than is emotional immaturity, and 
oddly enough, a person may be perfectly developed physically and 
intellectually and yet be emotionally immature. For instance, the 
adolescent or grown man who pouts for long periods over real or 
imaginary wrongs, who flies into towering rages, hollers and 
curses; or the young teen-age girl or young woman who goes into 
fits of anger and screams, slams doors, stamps her feet, dashes to 
her room and throws herself face down on the bed to pour out her 
tears, are people who are emotionally immature.

Here is a list of other things that indicate emotional immaturity.

(1) Gloominess over little failures

(2) Pessimism over slight difficulties 

(3) Complete panic when frightened or in an emergency 

(4) Throwing or breaking things when angry or crossed 

(5) Tears when thwarted, disappointed or upset 

(6) Selfishness, aggressiveness, rebelliousness, stubbornness 

(7) Needless and prolonged worry over trifles

(8) Morbid fears, strong hates, and unreasonable prejudices.

But how, you ask, may one acquire emotional control? To this I 
answer:

(1) Know yourself as you really are.

(2) Be individual. Try to pick your own hats and clothes. 

(3) Fight your own battles.

(4) Don't seek sympathy from others.

(5) Don't feel sorry for yourself.

(6) Never be indecisive.

(7) Avoid too much sentimentality over persons or causes.

(8) Resist parental over-possessiveness.

(9) Check first signs of jealousy. 

(10) Resist feeling of depression. Laugh at yourself. 

(11) Train your emotions as you would your will. 

(12) Learn to check your tongue when you are angry.

If this looks like a superhuman task it is not so difficult if you 
keep in mind that control of emotions does not mean suppression. 
Control of emotions means direction into channels that are 
founded on reality and bring material and spiritual satisfactions to 
you. Victory over self is achieved with great effort! It may spell the 
difference between happiness and unhappiness here and 
hereafter.

Anyone who plans marriage ought to make certain that he or she is 
emotionally mature and that the mate is also grown up 
emotionally, for without this maturity such a marriage is certain to 
be unhappy if not doomed to failure.

There is one more maturity that is equally important and should 
be well founded before any thought of marriage enters one's head, 
and that is vocational maturity. By vocational maturity is meant 
simply the know-how and acquisition of a trade, position, or 
profession that will permit the future husband to support a family 
and the acquisition of vocational knowledge that will permit a 
young woman to manage a home and wisely govern her children.

No wise young man will consider marriage until he has spent at 
least two years working at his chosen trade, profession, or 
position. Wisdom also demands that savings of from $1200 
upward ought to have been laid away against the wedding day, as 
well as a permanent assured monthly salary income. It is an 
accepted rule that the first week's pay ought to be large enough to 
pay the rent for the month. No fear is so haunting, so destructive, 
as that which results from economic insecurity. Love and an empty 
stomach are poor companions. Too, any young woman who 
considers marriage, yet possesses no skill in homemaking, 
cooking, and housekeeping, is one who is asking for trouble.


Prudence in choosing a potential mate

Now we come to the very important consideration of when and how 
to choose a mate, what to look for in a mate, and how not to spoil 
your chances of marriage.

All authorities on the subject agree that the best age for a man to 
marry is between twenty-two and twenty-nine and for a woman 
between twenty-one and twenty-eight. Allowing oneself a year at 
the most for courtship and engagement, a girl ought not to 
consider seriously any one individual before she is twenty, and no 
man ought to consider making a final choice of a life companion 
until he is at least twenty-one.

And how is a choice to be made? Believe me, there is a lot more 
skill than chance to picking the right person in marriage. It would 
appear prudent to write down a list of the qualities that you insist 
your one and only should have and then keep your eyes and your 
heart open. Here are a few suggestions for that list:

Good morals
Intelligence 
Fine physique 
Neatness 
Sportsmanship 
Sincerity 
Dependability 
Good sense of humor 
Truthfulness 
Consideration for others 
Thoughtfulness 
Nice manners 
Modesty 
Personality 
Industry 
Good family background

When making your list, be sure you determine whether you have 
these required qualities yourself--if not, set out to acquire the ones 
you lack. The time of proximate preparation should be spent not 
only in the eradication of evil habits but also in the acquisition of 
the virtues needed for happiness in marriage.

If diligent search has led you to believe that there is no one in 
your immediate circle of friends and acquaintances with the 
minimum of the ideals you have set for your future wife or 
husband, you should circulate. Join a club in a neighboring parish, 
attend church socials, political organizations, and sports groups, 
or mixed bowling leagues. Hold out, though, for a formal 
introduction and don't accept the two-toned whistle or the moron's 
mating call of "Hi, Toots!" as any substitute.

A "knock-down" to someone who appears to have most of the 
qualities you have set for a suitable "steady" is but the beginning. 
An introduction alone is useless without the follow-through. Here 
is where tact and common sense plus warmth of character come 
into play. Girls who want to know a man better will ask him where 
he lives and what he does, thus affording him a chance to talk 
about himself--the male failing. It places the girl at the receiving 
end of the conversation, makes her a good listener. If he stalls, 
start him on the weather, sports, his home, brothers and sisters. 
Get around to speaking about church, and let him know right from 
the start that you are a Catholic.

If things progress according to plan, invent a little house party 
during the following week. Tell him you were planning to have a 
few friends in and ask him if he would join them. In the case of a 
young man making a play for a nice young lady he has just met, he 
might suggest a movie with a couple of friends or a dance.

Here are a few important "don'ts" for first dates:

Don't try to be the life of the party.

Don't forget to introduce the new dates to your parents.

Don't overdress.

Don't talk too much--be a good listener.

Don't drink.

Don't forget to serve a nice lunch prepared by your own hands.

Don't neglect to learn to dance well. Your date has a right to expect 
this.

Don't "neck or pet." This shows lack of control and selfishness.

Don't park. Keep out of dark streets and country lanes and don't 
allow yourself to be led into temptation. Any time you can't answer 
"yes" to the question: "Would Christ or His Blessed Mother stay in 
this room or car?" it's time to move.

Don't be openly affectionate in public.

Don't write gushing, sloppy letters.

Don't waste your time on a person who is: 
     domineering
     bad-tempered 
     boastful
     jealous: (Holy Scripture says: "A jealous man or woman is 
          the grief and mourning of the heart.")
     overaggressive 
     lacking in consideration.

Remember marriage is not a reform school! A young woman must 
make a careful study of the person she intends to marry. It is 
important that she look for signs of selfishness, such as the 
honking of a car horn to summon her from the house. She must 
beware of the sulky young man, the fellow who boasts of his 
female conquests, the one who grabs the best chair in the house to 
rest his love-torn frame in, and the fellow who always wants things 
his way--all of these denote selfishness.

A young man ought to study the way in which his girl friend gets 
along with her parents and the others of her household. Beware of 
the street angel and house devil. Is she cheerful? Has she good 
judgment? Is she economical? Can she cook? Is she possessive? 
Hearken to the words of Holy Scripture: "A virtuous woman 
rejoices her husband, and he shall fulfill the years of his life in 
peace."

Someone has said that personality is like an iceberg--two-thirds of 
it is hidden. Now this is not quite true. If you are observant you 
can determine quite definitely the hidden characteristics of others 
by noting their common traits. For instance, a person who bites his 
fingernails is usually an introvert and is self-centered. The chain 
smoker is usually a deeply nervous person. The cigar-chewer is an 
aggressive person. The person who spends long periods gazing 
into the mirror is usually affected with infantilism. And the bushes 
are full of border-line screw-balls. Albert Deutsch asserts that 
there are 450,000 New Yorkers alone who need psychiatric 
treatment. By their fruits you should know them.

Here are a few characters you ought to give a wide berth: They are 
usually psycho.

The hard-boiled variety. These are invariably insensitive, heartless, 
ruthless, and cruel.

The grouchy variety. These growl at everything and everybody.

The suspicious variety. These think everyone is against them. They 
feel people talk about them.

The moody variety. One day on top of the world--the next down in 
the depths. These pout for days.

The neurotic variety. These frequently display hysteria. They 
complain of physical ailments on little or no medical basis. They 
love to talk about their ills.

The perverse personalities. These are always getting into trouble--at 
home, in the office, the plant, or in school.

Girls should beware of the following types of suitors: 
     Sugar daddy 
     Philandering 
     Paternal 
     Domineering 
     Possessive 

Men ought to avoid the following types of girls: 
     Baby doll 
     Over-romantic 
     Masculine 
     Frigid 
     Domineering
     Matriarchal 
     Possessive 
     Gold-digger

In choosing a mate for marriage remember that the happiest 
unions are those wherein both parties are socially and 
intellectually equal; both have the same high ideals; both are in 
good physical health; both are of the same faith; both have the 
approval of their parents; and both have a good attitude toward 
sex.

Here is an example of how tragic the absence of even one of these 
essentials for marriage can be.

A year or so ago I was fishing from a dock at a nearby yacht club 
when an elderly gentleman joined me. As we fished, a boat headed 
in for the dock and my companion said: "Father, there's a queer 
duck. He was once married to a school teacher, although he 
himself had only a grammar school education. The marriage ended 
in divorce because he could not stand his wife eternally correcting 
his English. That woman in the boat is his second wife. She is 
Spanish and can hardly speak English at all."

That conversation supplied concrete proof of the fact that social 
and intellectual inequality can wreck marriage.

The Holy Ghost very wisely warns that there are three things that 
disturb the earth: (1) a slave when he reigneth; (2) a fool when he 
is filled with meat, and (3) an odious woman when she is married.


Persevering prayer for guidance

So important is the matter of the choice of a mate that prayer for 
guidance and enlightenment is most essential. An old Russian 
proverb runs like this:

     Before embarking on a journey, pray once; 
     Before leaving for war, pray twice; 
     Before you marry, pray three times.

And His Holiness Pope Pius XI, in his Encyclical letter "On 
Marriage," warns suitors in these words:

"To the proximate preparation of a good married life belongs very 
specially the care in choosing a partner; on that depends a great 
deal whether the forthcoming marriage will be happy or not, since 
one may be to the other either a great help in leading a Christian 
life, or on the other hand, a great danger and hindrance. And, so 
that they will not deplore for the rest of their lives the sorrows 
arising from an indiscreet marriage, those about to enter into 
wedlock should carefully deliberate in choosing the person with 
whom henceforward they must live continually. They should in so 
deliberating keep before their minds the thought first of God and 
of the true religion of Christ, then of themselves, of their partner, 
of the children to come, as also of home and civil society, for 
which wedlock is as a fountain head. Let them diligently pray for 
Divine help, so that they will make their choice in accordance with 
Christian prudence, not indeed led by the blind and unchecked 
impulse of lust, nor by any desire of riches or other base influence, 
but by a true and noble love and by a sincere affection towards the 
future partner; and then let them strive in their married life toward 
those ends for which this state was constituted by God."


Parental counsel

Before thinking of engagement, be sure to consult your parents 
regarding your choice. Here, again, the wisdom of Pope Pius XI is 
evidenced in his words addressed to young men and women as 
follows:

"Let them not fail to ask the prudent advice of their parents with 
regard to the partner and let them regard this advice in no light 
manner, in order that by their mature knowledge and experience of 
human affairs they may guard against a baneful mistake, and on 
the threshold of matrimony may receive more abundantly the 
Divine blessing, the Commandment: "Honor thy father and thy 
mother," which is the first Commandment with a promise, "that it 
may be well with thee and thou mayest be long-lived upon the 
earth."

I can't imagine a worse insult to one's parents than to become 
engaged, much less married, without consulting them. It is 
something that will bother conscience as long as one lives. I can 
vividly recall a middle-aged man who called at the rectory one day. 
When I came into the office I noticed he was weeping, and he told 
me that the reason for his tears was simply that he had heard that 
day his daughter had been married a month earlier. He was hurt 
and crushed. Like every father, he had planned for the pleasure of 
seeing his daughter married to a worthwhile man. However, she 
had seen fit to mistrust him. "But, Father," he said, "why I weep 
today is that I did the same thing to my parents. I married without 
telling my parents and when I did break the news to Mother, she 
just looked at me--dry-eyed and calm--and said, 'Just wait, Son. 
Your turn will come too.' And it did!"


Consultation with your pastor or confessor

Not only should your parents be consulted, but also your pastor or 
confessor. Many a broken home or heart or both might have been 
avoided if the spiritual father had been asked as to the wisdom of 
the choice of mate in life and the choice of the life partner. And 
don't wait until you go in to have the banns announced. Call on the 
pastor or confessor before you become engaged.

When all these suggestions have been wisely followed and the 
choice has been made only after prayerful consideration and wise 
counsel, the parties become what is known as "engaged."


A proper period of engagement

What do we understand by engagement? An engagement is simply 
a mutual promise to marry. Its purpose is to permit the parties to 
get to know one another better and to test the depth and the 
sincerity of the mutual affection and love. As regards the length of 
the engagement, from six months to a year is reasonable and 
desirable.

The period of engagement is in no way to be considered a license 
for dangerous and/or impure love-making. Bear this in mind:

(1) All actions performed for the purpose of promoting or 
stimulating venereal pleasure are mortal sins.

(2) All directly venereal actions are mortal sins.

(3) All actions involving the proximate danger of performing 
directly venereal actions or of consenting to venereal pleasure are 
mortal sins.

(4) Indirectly venereal actions performed without a relatively 
sufficient reason are venial sins.

Now, regarding kissing and embracing the general rule is as 
follows: If they are indulged in from