EDITORIAL

The Blessed Trinity and ‘Gay Marriage’

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This weekend the Church celebrates Trinity Sunday. The dogma of the Trinity—which teaches us that there is one God in three Divine Persons—may sound theoretical and abstract, but in reality, it has some very practical implications for our daily lives. One of those implications concerns the highly controversial issue of “gay marriage.”
The dogma of the Trinity reminds us that the one, true God is a family of Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Each is omnipotent; each is omniscient; each is eternal; each is God.
In the Trinity, the Father loves the Son with an intense, perfect, eternal love. That love is so intense that it’s actually another Person—the Holy Spirit—who, as the Nicene Creed tells us, “proceeds from the Father and the Son.” The key point in all this is that the love within the Blessed Trinity is a love that is fruitful: the Father loves the Son, and from that love the Holy Spirit proceeds eternally.
In a speech he gave in Africa in 1988, Pope St. John Paul II reminded us that “Christian family life is a reflection of the life of the Blessed Trinity, where there is mutual giving and receiving of love among the three Divine Persons.” This, of course, should not surprise us, because we’re made in God’s image and likeness. Our family life here on earth is to reflect the life of the Blessed Trinity in heaven, because we’ve been made in the image and likeness of the Trinity.
All this having been said, if a marriage here on earth is to reflect the life of the Trinity properly, that marriage obviously must be fruitful (or at least it must have the natural potential to be fruitful). It must be fruitful (or at least potentially so), because the Father’s love for the Son in the Blessed Trinity is fruitful.
But a so-called “gay marriage” can never be fruitful. Students learn that in Biology 101. Two men cannot have a natural child of their own; two women cannot have a natural child of their own. It’s impossible. Only the marriage of a man and a woman has the natural potential to be fruitful.
There are many reasons to oppose gay marriage. One of the most important, of course, is that children thrive best when they’re nurtured by a man and a woman who are committed to one another in a traditional marital relationship. Studies have shown this again and again. But standing behind all these reasons is the simple truth that gay marriage is contrary to God’s will because it’s “anti-Trinitarian.” The love of the Father and the Son in the Blessed Trinity is fruitful. The love in a gay relationship is not. And it never can be.