Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Catechism in a Year podcast,

where we encounter God's plan of sheer goodness for us, revealed in scripture, and passed

down through the tradition of the Catholic faith.

The Catechism in a year is brought to you by ascension.

In 365 days, we'll read through the Catechism of the Catholic Church discovering our identity and God's family as we journey together toward our heavenly home. This is day 219. We're reading paragraphs 1601 to 1608. As always, I'm using the Ascension edition of the Catechism, which includes the foundations of faith approach, but you can follow along with any recent version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. You can also download your own catechism in a year reading plan by visiting ascensionpress.com

slash CIY. And lastly, you can click follow or subscribe in your podcast app for daily updates

and daily notifications. As I said, today, day 219 yesterday. We had our last day of holy

orders. Today we have our first day of holy matrimony.

You probably already knew that was coming because I mentioned it a bunch of times yesterday.

And so as we launch into today, what we're going to see is we're going to see what is

marriage in God's plan.

So there's two aspects we're looking at.

First, then tomorrow we'll look at more aspects about marriage and God's plan.

But the first two are marriage in the order of creation and then marriage under the regime of sin. Those are the two

kind of like maybe handles we're going to look at today. So how did God intend this to be?

What did God intend for marriage to be? And then how do we experience it now in the fact that,

you know, we live in a broken world.

We have original sin. We have our own actual sins that we tend to choose in our daily lives. And so how do we experience it? So what was God's intention? How do we experience it? And tomorrow we're going to look at marriage under the pedagogy of the law and also marriage in the Lord. So looking at that. But today, these two aspects are looking at more in a deeper way, just a couple paragraphs, each, marriage in the order of creation. What was God's intention? What's God's vision? What is God's vision for marriage? And then what's our experience? What's marriage under the regime of sin? Like how do we experience this is great gift that's been distorted? It's not lost, but it has been broken in some ways. And so we're looking at those two aspects of marriage as he launch into, ah, this is so good. You know, I think maybe sometimes we might have, we might think that, oh, we're going to talk now about the sacrament of holy matrimony. And we're going to begin by saying, you know, sacrament of holy matrimony as such and such and kind of like this really antiseptic or really kind of sterile vision of it. Not that at all. We're looking at what is marriage and God's plan, which is that the word that comes to my mind is the word robust. I'm not sure if that's the best word, but it is full. It is dynamic. It is active. it's alive. Because God's plan is rightful. It's active. God's plan is

alive. And so marriage and God's plan is going to be a great gift. So as we launch into this study,

learning about this great gift, maybe even being reminded of some aspects of this great gift,

let us call upon our Father and call for the Holy Spirit to come in and guide

our minds, enlighten them, and set our hearts on fire. So we pray, Father in heaven, in the name

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