"What enlivens the contract and does not leave it dead, merely registered in the ecclesiastical and civil archives, is love. Love has to be considered a lively and living element in marriage that, consequently, must be kept alive, because it is subject, like all living things that are not defended or cultivated, to decay and death. Love is indeed the cohesive substance that completes the two beings, harmonizing their tendencies, and merging their bodies as well as their personalities; it makes them harmonize, match, penetrate to the point of overcoming distances, obstacles, as well as natural and subjective contrasts, so that they form one being." This is one of the stimulating and deep thoughts in Fr. Enrico Mauri’s catechesis on marriage, collected in the book Ascendere insieme al Signore (Ascending together to the Lord) recently published by Ave (223 pages, 18 €). The book invites couples to sanctify themselves through asceticism in the practice of love and mutual help, as well as through prayer recited together.
Father Mauri (1883-1967), since 2001 Servant of God, published these texts for the first time after World War II. In them, he developed an original line of thought, born of prolonged meditation on the Encyclical Casti Connubi that Pope Pius XI promulgated in 1930. Ahead of his contemporaries, many of his innovative ideas, based on the assimilation of the husband-wife relationship to that between Christ (the Groom) and the Church (His Bride), still cast an original light on the sacrament of marriage, thus leading to deep reflections that can say a great deal to engaged couples and spouses of our times about the meaning of Christian love. "Marriage—writes the author—contained only in the order of nature, so that it may be conform to the Creator's plan, will always be 'water and not wine’ (the miracle of the wedding at Cana); consequently, lived in the pierced wineskins of sin, It will easily become stagnant and, in any case, a marital dish without the impulses and the beauty of grace. The living sacramental marriage is wine that illuminates with holy love, gives full joy, and inebriates with the intensity of Christ’s mystical love."
