Youcat commented through CCC – Question n. 417 – Part III.

YOUCAT Question n. 417 – Part III. What significance does the sexual encounter have within marriage?

(Youcat answer - repeated) According to God’s will, husband and wife should encounter each other in bodily union so as to be united ever more deeply with one another in love and to allow children to proceed from their love.

A deepening through CCC  

(CCC 2366) Fecundity is a gift, an end of marriage, for conjugal love naturally tends to be fruitful. A child does not come from outside as something added on to the mutual love of the spouses, but springs from the very heart of that mutual giving, as its fruit and fulfillment. So the Church, which "is on the side of life" (FC 30) teaches that "each and every marriage act must remain open per se to the transmission of life" (HV 11). "This particular doctrine, expounded on numerous occasions by the Magisterium, is based on the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act" (HV 12; cf. Pius XI, encyclical, Casti connubii).    

Reflecting and meditating 

(Youcat comment) In Christianity, the body, pleasure, and erotic joy enjoy a high status: “Christianity … believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty and our energy. Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion: and nearly all the greatest love poetry in the world has been produced by Christians. If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once” (C. S. Lewis). Pleasure, of course, is not an end in itself. When the pleasure of a couple becomes self-enclosed and is not open to the new life that could result from it, it no longer corresponds to the nature of love.

(CCC Comment)

(CCC 2367) Called to give life, spouses share in the creative power and fatherhood of God (Cf. Eph 3:14; Mt 23:9). "Married couples should regard it as their proper mission to transmit human life and to educate their children; they should realize that they are thereby cooperating with the love of God the Creator and are, in a certain sense, its interpreters. They will fulfill this duty with a sense of human and Christian responsibility" (GS 50 § 2).

(The next question is: What is the significance of the child in a marriage?)