Aug 21, 2019

“Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For
the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the
church, his body, and is himself its Savior. As the church is
subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to
their husbands.”

These words of St. Paul in Ephesians 5 have been a continual
source of discomfort to modern Catholics, and most priests would
rather explain this teaching away or avoid discussing it
altogether. For the faithful Catholic, however, treating Scripture
and Church teaching as something embarrassing is not an option, nor
is relativizing and redefining it into oblivion. Ephesians 5 is the
crucial source for how marriage, so badly damaged by the Fall, has
been redeemed and supernaturalized in the Cross of Christ.

In this episode, Mary Stanford explains how we can understand
and even come to love this teaching which so repels our egalitarian
age. She brings to the table her study of Pope St. John Paul II’s
Theology of the Body and the thought of Edith Stein, as well as
decades of experience as a wife and mother.

Links

Mary Stanford’s article “The Dynamic of the Gift: Authority and
Submission in Christian Marriage”
https://www.hprweb.com/2013/01/the-dynamic-of-the-gift-authority-and-submission-in-christian-marriage/

Some of the teaching sources mentioned in this episode:

1 Cor 11:3, Ephesians 5, Colossians 3:18-19, Timothy 2 and 3,
Titus 2:5, 1 Peter 3:1-7

Pope Leo XIII, Arcanum divinae sapientiae, 1880

https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?id=4858&repos=1&subrepos=0&searchid=1947264

Pope Pius XI, Casti connubii, 1930
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?id=3370&repos=1&subrepos=0&searchid=1947266

Pope St. John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?id=3381&repos=1&subrepos=0&searchid=1947268

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