THCP224 - Marriage and Family: Catholic Faith and Practice

Year

Credit points

Campus offering

Prerequisites

THCT100 What Christians Believe

Teaching organisation

This unit involves 150 hours of focused learning, or the equivalent of 10 hours per week for 15 weeks. The total includes formally structured learning activities such as lectures, tutorials, online learning, or supervision. The remaining hours typically involve reading, research, and the preparation of tasks for assessment.

Unit rationale, description and aim

Marriage and family have been integral to the life of human societies and to the practice of Christian communities. The Christian understanding of marriage and family is deeply affirmative, with marriage being regarded as a sacrament and the family as a "domestic church". In both, God's love and grace is received and lived in the context of human relationships as a covenant. Hence engagement with the understandings and practices of marriage and family in the Christian tradition offers insight into God's own saving plan for humanity. They also offer rich understandings that have had global influence on how different peoples and societies live out their familial and married life. This unit explores the contribution of Catholic faith and practice to the constitution of marriage/matrimony and family life, particularly understood in the context of a covenantal theology and drawing on recent papal teaching. It examines the historical development of the Christian experience of family, and key theological concepts concerning marriage as a relationship of life and love, the place of sex/gender, the gift of children, and the changing roles of men and women. The unit provides students with the conceptual foundations and insights, with reference to the Catholic tradition, from which to develop and apply critical understandings of contemporary aspirations and experiences in marriage and family.

Learning outcomes

To successfully complete this unit you will be able to demonstrate you have achieved the learning outcomes (LO) detailed in the below table.

Each outcome is informed by a number of graduate capabilities (GC) to ensure your work in this, and every unit, is part of a larger goal of graduating from ACU with the attributes of insight, empathy, imagination and impact.

Explore the graduate capabilities.

Content

Topics will include: 

• Biblical teaching on marriage and family. 
• Marriage and family in historical development.
• Human love as a lens for understanding the nature of divine love. 
• Christian marriage as Sacrament. 
• Marriage as a covenantal partnership of life and love between two equal persons. 
• The perspective of Gaudium et spes on sexuality and marriage.
• Christian family life as a saving sacrament: the “domestic church”. 
• The teaching of recent popes about marriage and family, especially that of Pope Francis’ Amoris Laetitia and St John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio. 
• Contemporary issues which could include the following: pastoral care of engaged couples (marriage preparation), the newly married, and ‘older’ married couples; “conscious” parenthood; divorce and annulment; abortion and contraception; rise in secularism and sexualisation of culture; and, fertility and infertility 
• Ecumenical and interfaith perspectives 

Learning and teaching strategy and rationale

This unit involves 150 hours of focused learning, or the equivalent of 10 hours per week for 15 weeks. The total includes formally structured learning activities such as lectures, tutorials, online learning, or supervision. The remaining hours typically involve reading, research, and the preparation of tasks for assessment. 

The unit is normally offered in attendance mode or multi-mode. Students learn through formally structured and sequenced learning activities that support the achievement of the learning outcomes. Students are asked to critically reflect, analyse, and integrate new information with existing knowledge, draw meaningful new connections, and then apply what they have learned. Collaborative and peer learning is also emphasized.  

THCP224 emphasises students as active, adult learners. Students are recognised as adult learners who engage best when what they are learning is relevant to them and gives them the opportunity to be responsible for their own learning. In many ways, the student is the one who drives the learning forward, and their active participation in this unit is essential. Learning is designed to be an engaging and supportive experience, which helps students to develop critical thinking and reflection skills.  

Assessment strategy and rationale

The assessment tasks for this unit are designed for students to demonstrate their achievement of each learning outcome.   

Given the alignment of learning outcomes to the assessment tasks, in order to pass this unit, students are required to attempt all assessment tasks and achieve an overall mark of 50% or higher.  

Assessment task 1 enables students to display achievement of LO1 by explaining the foundational biblical and theological concepts of the Catholic understanding of marriage and family, and their historical development. 

Building on this, assessment task 2 requires students to analyse an important aspect of the contemporary Catholic theology of marriage and the family, with particular reference to Vatican II and recent papal teaching. 

Assessment task 3 asks students to reflect critically on the contemporary experience of marriage and family in light of the learnings from the unit and assess hopes and directions for family and marriage in the context of recent Catholic teaching and theology. 

Overview of assessments

Representative texts and references

Anderson, Carl, and José Granados. 

Called to Love: Approaching John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. New York: Doubleday/Crown Publishing, 2009. 

Elliot, Peter J. What God Has Joined. New York: Alba House, 1990. 

Francis. Amoris Laetitia: The joy of love. Post synodal Apostolic Exhortation. 19 March 2016. Online: http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20160319_amoris-laetitia.html.  

Granados, José, Stephan Kampowski, and Juan José Pérez-Soba. Accompanying, Discerning, Integrating: A Handbook for the Pastoral Care of the Family According to Amoris Laetitia. Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Road, 2017. 

John Paul II. Familiaris Consortio: On the role of the Christian family in the modern world. Post Synodal Apostolic Exhortation. 22 November 1981. Online: http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_19811122_familiaris-consortio.html.  

John Paul II. A Theology of the Body: man and woman He created them. Trans. Michael Waldstein. Pauline: Boston, MA, 2006.  

Olsen, Glenn W, ed. Christian Marriage: A Historical Study. New York: Crossroad, 2001. 

Patterson, Colin, and Conor Sweeney, eds. God and Eros: The Ethos of the Nuptial Mystery. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015. 

Rubio, Julie Hanlon.  A Christian Theology of Marriage and Family.  New York: Paulist Press, 2003. 

“Gaudium et spes”.  In Vatican II Council. Vatican Council II: The Conciliar Documents. Edited by A. Flannery. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1975.