The Catholic times. [volume] (Columbus, Ohio) 1951-current, 1958-09-05
JOSEPH BREIC-
Still In Love
With My Wife.

A man once sent me a note after reading a
newspaper piece ! had written about my wife.
Mary, he remarked, must feel rather special,
seeing her husband, at my age, Economically in love
with her.
| read the note with a touch of establishment.
! hadn't thought OF my attitude toward Mary as at
Indeed, the possibility of not being romantic
about my wife hadn't entered my mind.
After all, we are Catholics; and romance exists
because the Church exists.
The very word romance comes from Rome. y
The romance languages are the tongues of the,
Oldest Catholic areas. :
Romance had a beginning because the Church
had a beginning. i
Romance is indestructible because the Church,
is indestructible. Il
AT TIL HEART of romance is Christian mar.
riage. At its deepest root is the delicate, the almost
shy Christian virtue Of purity.
Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall
see God"
Unless you see God with the eve of your soul.
you will not see your wife as Gods gift, given to be
cherished for better or for worse, for richer or for
poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do you
part.
He who does not see God does not deeply feel,
does not embrace with his whole heart the wonder
full climaxline of the most romantic of all stories:
And they married and lived happily ever after"
THE TRUE ROMANTIC is the troubador of God.
He IS the singer of songs and the maker of poems
about undying love, about innocence, about noble
goodness-about the image and likeness of God in
men and women.
AuCS WOlIu v UCCu WlLuOuU-duQ is uOC
today without-falSe romantics.
These are the talented people who debase
romance for deception, seduction, abandonment,
promiscuity, cruel Selfishness.
Romantics of this kind are the murderers of
romance. In a sense they are its suicides. They put
to death in themselves their oWn romantic natures.
The right use of romance is the celebrating of
true love human love and divine love. But some
have perverted it for betrayal of these splendid
things.
Worse, they have misused romance to tell hide.
Gus hes-to represent ugly, egoistic, sef-seeking
wrongs as admirable.
ROMANCE, TRULY, came to us through Our
Lady, to whose litany of praise might well be added
the invocation, mother of Good Romance"
Romance could not begin to be until men who
honored Mary as inviolable virgin and yet Mother
Of God elevated womanhood to the heights for which
God had destined it.
When strong men honored women as women
have the right to be honored, romance was born.
Romance was Saluted in the flashing swords of
knights prepared to die to protect the purity of
every woman.
And there grew upon Christians the realization
OF what Christian marriage is.
TWO made for each other is what
the Church, divinely romantic, says to the BRIDE
groom and bride at the altar.
There they confer upon each other one of
Christs seven sacraments for the sanctification Of
souls, for living happily forever after.
Then in the oneness of two in one flesh they
elect each other to the splendid office of Father and
Mother; they incarnate and take to their hearts a new
immortal being created by God and sent out of the
void into their arms.
Economically in love with my wife? What else,
pray?