Pius XI, 1922-1939

human power, but on divine law, whose only guardian and interpreter is the Church of Christ. Yet, not even such a power can for any cause ever affect a Christian marriage which is valid and consummated. For, since the marriage contract is fully accomplished in such case, so also absolute stability and indissolubility by God's will are apparent, which cannot be relaxed by any human authority.

If we wish to investigate with due reverence the intimate reason for this divine will, we shall easily discover it in the mystical signification of Christian marriage, which is fully and perfectly had in a marriage consummated between the faithful. For with the Apostle, in his Epistle to the Ephesians as witness [Eph. 5:32] (to which we referred in the beginning), the marriage of Christians recalls that most perfect union which exists between Christ and the Church: "This is a great sacrament, but I speak in Christ and in the church," which union, indeed, as long as Christ shall live and the Church through Him, surely can never be dissolved by any separation. . . .

2237. In this blessing of the sacrament, in addition to its indissoluble firmness, far higher emoluments are also contained, very aptly indicated by the word, "sacrament"; for to Christians this is not a hollow and empty name, since Christ the Lord, "the Institutor and Perfector"¹ of the sacraments, raising the marriage of His faithful to a true and proper sacrament of the New Law, made it in very fact a sign and source of that peculiar interior grace by which it perfects natural love, confirms an indissoluble union, and sanctifies the spouses.²

And since Christ established valid conjugal consent between the faithful as a sign of grace, the nature of the sacrament is so intimately bound up with Christian marriage that no true matrimony can exist between baptized persons "unless by that very fact it be a sacrament."³

When then the faithful with sincere minds give such consent, they open up a treasure of sacramental grace for themselves, from which they draw supernatural strength for fulfilling their obligations and duties faithfully, nobly, and perseveringly even until death.

This sacrament, in the case of those who, as they say, place no obex in its way, not only increases the permanent principle of supernatural life, namely sanctifying grace, but also bestows peculiar gifts, good dispositions of mind, and seeds of grace, by increasing and perfecting the natural powers, so that the spouses are able not only to understand by reason, but to know intimately, to hold firmly, to wish efficaciously, and to carry out, indeed, whatever pertains to the marriage state, both its ends and obligations; finally, it grants them the right to obtain the actual