2. Finality and Marriage, by Margaret Monahan Hogan. ISBN 0-87462-600-5. 121 pages, paperbound, $15.
NOTE: See #34, below for the second revised and updated edition.
“Finality and Marriage is a book about the nature of marriage, its ends and its act. Philosopher Margaret Monahan Hogan is convinced that only when we accurately grasp the vetera (the essential elements of the tradition) will we be prepared to move to the nova. This move is a continuity. For this reason Hogan examines the notion of marriage and its ends in the documents of recent tradition beginning with Casti connubii. Hogan is no iconoclast. Her treatment is full, fair and respectful. She notes that in the last sixty years there has been a gradual but perceptible development in official documents. What was suspect in the thirties is contemporary orthodoxy. Concretely, Hogan traces the conceptual move of Church documents from marriage as a procreative institution to marriage as an intimate personal union. It is within this notion of marriage that we must weigh the distinct ends of marriage (the union itself, children, and the individual goods of the partners), hierarchize them and articulate the claims they make upon us. Hogan finds the demand of inseparability for the unitive and procreative aspects of every act of sexual intercourse to be without foundation. She takes the consequences of this when she finds contraception (and even sterilization) and artificial insemination morally appropriate given sufficient reason.” — From the Foreword by Richard A. McCormick, S.J.
Marquette University Press
