Why Get Married? The Catholic View of the Meaning and Purpose of Marriage – Prof. Michael Dauphinais
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 26 December 2025
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Prof. Michael Dauphinais explains marriage as a lifelong covenant of self-giving love between a man and a woman that images Christ’s union with the Church, ordered to the spouses’ sanctification and the procreation and education of children .
This lecture was given on October 15th, 2025, at Iowa State University.
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About the Speakers:
Michael A. Dauphinais, Ph.D., serves as the Fr. Matthew Lamb Professor of Catholic Theology and the co-director of the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal at Ave Maria University, Ave Maria, Florida. He has co-authored with Matthew Levering Knowing the Love of Christ: An Introduction to the Theology of Thomas Aquinas; Holy People, Holy Land: A Theological Introduction to the Bible; and The Wisdom of the Word: Biblical Answers to Ten Questions about Catholicism. He specializes in C.S. Lewis, the Bible, and St. Thomas Aquinas. He speaks frequently in both academic and popular settings, and particularly enjoys visiting Thomistic Institute student chapters. Dr. Dauphinais hosts The Catholic Theology Show podcast to help a wide audience discover the richness of coming to know and love God as he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ.
Keywords: Catholic Theology of Marriage, Covenant and Sacrament, Christ and the Church as Spousal Model, Family and Vocation, Fidelity and Indissolubility, Openness to Life and Children, Self-Giving Love and Freedom, Spousal Sanctification, Vocation of Husband and Wife, Wedding and Lifelong Commitment
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Tumistic Institute podcast. |
| 0:05.5 | Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. |
| 0:12.0 | The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tumistic Institute chapters around the world. |
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| 0:23.6 | Now I want to begin a little bit talking about, right, we're going to be talking about |
| 0:27.6 | the topics of sexuality and marriage. Right? This is not just an argument about the |
| 0:34.6 | existence of God, which is very important, but not necessarily |
| 0:38.8 | something that everybody has intense personal reactions to. |
| 0:42.7 | Whenever we're talking about something to do with sexuality and marriage, right, this is |
| 0:47.1 | something that all of us have personal experiences with. |
| 0:51.0 | So one thing I want to begin is I want to begin by asking not for your agreement, but for your understanding. |
| 0:59.0 | I want to begin asking you to not compare with what I'm going to present tonight, but to try to identify with what I'm presenting tonight. |
| 1:15.1 | When we're talking about topics of sex and marriage, right, everyone has their experience, |
| 1:22.2 | everyone has a fair amount of wisdom, some from good decisions, and often others from bad decisions. |
| 1:31.3 | So many people could come and share a certain amount of wisdom from your own experience |
| 1:39.0 | and your own opinions and judgments on sexual ethics, sexual morality. And I want to basically share with you |
| 1:49.7 | what I've learned from studying what the church teaches, from studying what Aquinas teaches, |
| 1:56.2 | and especially in some ways, right, really trying to recover the biblical vision. |
| 2:10.5 | I want to begin by sharing a little bit of just an admission, right, of the unpopularity of the churches and the Bible's teachings on sexuality. There was a book in 2014, the young Catholic America, I believe, where it said there's |
| 2:22.1 | young people display little evidence of any genuine anger against the church, but they often |
| 2:29.4 | find the church's teachings on against premarital sex, against homosexuality, what they call |
... |
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