The priest who will be stationed at our parish later this month has often remarked that Catholic colleges would do young people a great service if they paid attention to vocations and marriage as much as they pay attention to career services. The heat of midsummer is upon us, and soon college freshmen will be departing for Catholic and other colleges across the nation. Families interested in sending their child, niece, nephew, grandchild or godchild to school with a readable handbook would do well to consider this slim but profound volume, Saving Christian Marriage.

This volume features a brief foreword by Bishop Thomas Doran of Rockford, Illinois, a preface by Dr. Charles E. Rice, Chairman of the Wanderer Forum Foundation, and a final page of sobering reminders about what has changed since the body of this book, a series of talks given at the 1973 Wanderer Forum, was composed. Yet these incidental features are only the beginning of the book's true value. Its magnificence lies in the fact that it presents essays that dealt with Christian marriage before its image became effaced from our society.

Supplemental essays in this volume, written today about gay marriage and single mothers, mirror today's social climate, where the reality of marriage is so diminished that a Catholic young person would be more exposed to material dealing with the abnormalities of sexuality than the ideal of marriage. In addition, the current debates about "gay marriage" and "civil unions" have corrupted the public discourse so that we are used to considering marriage as a purely economic arrangement. The matter of procreation is entering the realm of freakishness as Britain allows experimentation on human/ animal hybrid embryos.

Even popularizations of Theology of the Body are usually approaching the teachings of the late Holy Father John Paul II from the viewpoint of a corrupted society. Therefore, it is excellent to read and recommend essays written before marriage was destroyed. It is quite refreshing, for a change, to read essays that considered divorce shocking, gay marriage unthinkable, and marriage a sacred, lifelong institution created by and, yes, pleasing to God.

These essays, though, are sober in nature and were written in 1973-the year of the Roe v Wade decision in America. Therefore, while the fruits of abortion, free love and contraception were far in the future, the talented thinkers featured in this book were able to reason, in remarkable fashion, to the problems that we face today. Even the possibility of mass genocide, something not seen in previously Christianized countries until the Balkan and Rwandan massacres of the 1990's, was foretold as a fruit of the problems just beginning then.

The book begins with the 1973 Wanderer Forum keynote speech by Most Rev. Godfrey M. P. Okoye of Enugu, Nigeria. This essay's theme is that Catholic theology opposes the present-day attempts to interpret marriage as a profane reality. In this beautiful essay he urges us to "acquire Christ's attitude and outlook towards marriage." He reminds us that "God intends marriage as the usual way of life," and that the viewpoint that sees it as inferior to religious life is Manichean. He discusses the sacramentality of marriage, its salvific dimension for all members of the family, and the perfect love that should characterize this symbol of the love between Christ and his Church. Next, he discusses factors that jeopardize marriage: lack of true love [agape],marital infidelity, birth control. Remedies include chaste courtship, self-mastery and self-denial within married life, large-heartedness, true spiritual love, married heroism.

This is followed by Mgsr. Alphonse Popek's essay, "The Splendor of the Sacramental Union," a beautiful talk on the sacramental aspects of marriage. Msgr. Popek said, "In the Old Testament, the natural contract of marriage, like the wine first served at the wedding feast of Cana, was good but not good enough to make saints of men and women on pilgrimage to Heaven. Christ… took the good wine of the natural contract and gives only those men and women who believe in Him and are baptized in His name the better wine of the Sacrament which not only challenges the spouses to become greater saints of God but actually infuses those graces by which they can attain the highest reaches of spiritual perfection." In another beautiful passage, he writes that it is the man as God's minister who confers on the woman "those soul beauties which make her the figure of the Church," and "likewise, it is the woman, who as God's minister, confers on the man those soul beauties which make him a figure of Christ, the Bridegroom of the Church."

Next in the selection is an essay by the legendary Dr. William A Marra, entitled "The Virtue of Married Chastity." Dr. Marra needs no introduction to the readers of The Wanderer, and this reviewer scribbled "awesome talk" in the margins of this book as I was reading. The keystone of this talk is that the vow is the essence of the marriage, whether people fall in or out of "love."

But an amazing surprise is Dr. Reginald Gallop's talk "Children: The Outstanding Gift of Marriage." Dr. Gallop, a former population control advocate who came to believe that the "overpopulation myth" was untrue, had prescient insights in the future that awaited us, foretelling today's trends in genetic engineering, euthanasia, infanticide, genocide, eco-spirituality. He takes issue with the concept of "quality of life," which most of us were mercifully unfamiliar with until the last decade or so. It was quite jarring to read this essay as the Live Earth concerts were taking place, and realizing how much of the contemporary scene he foresaw. "God respects man's decision to ask Him to leave the stage of life, and as He leaves the podium, Satan takes over the puppet show that is left, even though the players and most of the audience are oblivious to his presence," he writes. He foretells that the anti-co-creation views that begin with contraception and the rejection of children will end in genocide.

Dr. William H. Marshner: "A Sign of Contradiction," is good reading for all those who have been left blindsided by the argument that Humanae Vitae does not employ the language of infallibility, and therefore is not infallible teaching. Dr. Marshner's talk reviews the prior encyclical on birth control, Casti Connubii, and points out that it explicitly uses the formula for invoking the infallibility of the ordinary magisterium. This presents the Catholic with a much stronger argument to accept the teaching on birth control, because, just as Christians were en masse abandoning the prohibition of birth control, a teaching universally held by all Christians from A.D. 33 to A.D. 1930, the Catholic Church reiterated the infallibility of this teaching. His talk provides needed perspective, since Humanae Vitae and Theology of the Body can seem like theological novelties if one forgets that there was a universal consensus against birth control until the twentieth century. It is very important to introduce young people to the beautiful encyclical Casti Connubii, which is at least as eloquent as Humanae Vitae or the Wednesday audiences of John Paul II.

English intellectual Christopher Derrick's 1973 Forum speech "Beyond Splendor: The Other Side of the Coin," has two moments of genius. The first is when he writes, regarding the sexually permissive society, "The phenomenon isn't likely to last very long, since societies in which family life is weakened and in which sexual permissiveness prevails are thereby weakened in themselves, as societies, and are therefore, in biological or evolutionary or historical terms, unlikely to survive." Indeed, the recent past of "sex, drugs and rock and roll" has long since faded into our dreary present of designer kids, skim milk, and New Age elevator music. The second moment of genius is when he describes the process of falling in love, which in a sexually permissive culture was overvalued [and is now undervalued], as a experience of transcendence, in which the person falling in love "has come to see one of God's creatures in something, like the light in which God sees all of His creatures all the time….[A]nd it's only our blindness that prevents us from seeing the fact and so enables us to be bored in this wonderful and delicate creation and in that blazing and sacramental thing, that embodiment of Christ's relationship with His Church, a marriage."

Dr. Charles E. Rice's essay, "Poisoned Pastures," is about Roe v. Wade, and though written in 1973, it is still timely. Its punch line is the call for a Human Life Amendment, which, sadly, does not exist 34 years after Roe took place. He also calls for a pro-life organization that will oppose all abortions, contraception, and government funding of family planning. It is good to read the reasons why we need these, and then recall that American Life League, Human Life International and Population Research Institute, to name a few great pro-life organizations, all fit this description. As usual, Dr. Rice calls for strong and uncompromising political action, but emphasizes that "we've got to rechristianize American society and ultimately, to disestablish the State religion of secularism. And we're going to do that through the power of prayer. We're also going to do it through hard work, but primarily through the power of prayer, because this whole tendency is foreign to nature and to God."

The following essays included in Saving Christian Marriage fast-forward to 2007. Their inclusion is excellent, although it would be helpful in a second edition to note with each of these essays that they are written now rather than in 1973. Also recommended would be a brief editorial note at the beginning of each essay, pointing out why same-sex marriage and the loss of dignity of women, respectively, are important footnotes to this discussion.

Frank Morriss' essay "Same-Sex Marriage: When Two Can Never Be One," deals with the essential realities needed to make a marriage a marriage. This reviewer underlined the important epistemological statement, "There are essentials to all realities…." While this is a review of Philosophy 101 for the older generation, younger people, blinded by the endless possibilities of "virtual reality" and the blurring of the concept of nature that takes place when researchers mix human and animal embryo cells in a Petri dish, will find this statement shocking, perhaps naïve, but important to assimilate in order to make sense of the Catholic teachings on sexual morality and marriage. Morriss' essay also ends in uncovering this disturbing tendency: "More and more Christians seem to be surrendering to lust rather than defeating it by conformity to what Christ taught."

James Bemis's essay "Women's Rights, Lost Dignity," presents an informative argument that "women's rights are safeguarded by the illegality of abortion and divorce." Bemis writes, "modern females are treated with greater disrespect-that is, lied to, abandoned, and often treated as little more than sexual objects-than women have been traditionally, all in the name of feminism." He ends in saying, "It is a sad commentary that courts will enforce the assurances made under a business contract or even a gentleman's agreement, but not the infinitely more important ones men and women make in their marriage vows."

This little volume ends with Fr. Benjamin Luther's 1973 Wanderer Forum talk, "Children of the Promise," which treats the topic of marriage as a foreshadowing of the endless marriage in the new heaven and the new earth. This topic is, of course, treated in more recent writings, notably Pope John Paul II's Wednesday Catechesis on the Theology of the Body, but its value to readers, especially younger readers, lies mainly in its simple philosophical logic. Heaven, he writes, is not best conceptualized as the prize for a race, but "better pictured as knowledge related to study… It is intrinsic, not extrinsic." The concept of the intrinsic was more familiar to the world of 1973, where pumpkin seeds were not genetically modified, or milk filled with bovine growth hormone, or research labs filled with baby human beings, frozen for the purposes of experimentation or implantation. Thirty years ago, the human nature, and nature, that existed for thousands of years were still secure realities.

It is important, urgent, in fact, for today's readers to remember that this marriage-based, nature-based world existed only a short time ago; that human history was full of intrinsic realities, and today's preternatural state of virtual reality, cloning and the loss of nature is completely new. In order to recover the sense of Christian marriage, we must first recover our memory of human nature, and of our relationship to God the Creator as his co-creators. For this reason, these essays are essential reading for all Catholics, and for young people seeking to believe that the "Theology of the Body" refers to a reality that once existed, instead of a dream that bears no relationship to the ever-more-frightening landscape of divorce, lies, economically-motivated and loveless "marriages," infidelity, and live-in arrangements of all sorts. Send this to your kids and grandkids starting college, or starting marriage. And, if you are a Catholic bookstore owner, a handful of these in your "marriage and family" corner would be a good edition and a labor of love.

Ellen Rice is the editor of The John Paul II LifeGuide: Words to Live By (St. Augustine's Press, 2006). She is a full-time freelance writer on a variety of topics including religion, education and business.