Marriage is a vocation, a specific calling in which two people give themselves to one another, in a partnership of love, for the whole of life. In a Catholic understanding of marriage, marriage is directed both toward the mutual love of the spouses and to the procreation and education of children. Marriage is meant to be an image or symbol of the love of Christ for His Church.

"Sacred Scripture begins with the creation of man and woman in the image and likeness of God and concludes with a vision of "the wedding-feast of the Lamb. The intimate community of life and love which constitutes the married state has been established by the Creator and endowed by him with its own proper laws. . . God himself is the author of marriage.

The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator. God, who created man out of love, also calls him to love the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. For man is created in the image and likeness of God who is himself love. Since God created man and woman, their mutual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man. It is good, very good, in the Creator's eyes. And this love which God blesses is intended to be fruitful and to be realized in the common work of watching over creation.

'And God blessed them, and God said to them: "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it." '

Holy Scripture affirms that man and woman were created for one another: 'It is not good that the man should be alone.' The woman, 'flesh of his flesh,' his equal, his nearest in all things, is given to him by God as a 'helpmate;' she thus represents God from whom comes our help.

'Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.' The Lord himself shows that this signifies an unbreakable union of their two lives by recalling what the plan of the Creator had been in the beginning: "So they are no longer two, but one flesh.' "