I was teaching a class last night and we spoke about the sacrament of marriage. One question that interests me and that I asked of the students is, what is the difference between a sacramental marriage with its graces as presented here in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and a successful marriage that is non-sacramental?

Surely, no one would suggest that sacramental marriages, i.e. between two baptized persons, are better or that they are capable of being better than non-sacramental marriages.

I would argue that the grace of the marriage sacrament is not present to make one's marriage "a success," rather it is there to enable one's marriage to be useful in building the Kingdom of God. So what a sacramental couple can do by virtue of their sacrament is tap into that grace and use it in a special way to build the Church.

However, I think that to have a top notch marriage, special grace is not necessary, or else God created an institution that was doomed for failure except for in the lives of very relatively few in the world's history who had access to this grace. The fact is that we all know non-sacramental marriages that are nothing short of wonderful and sacramental marriages that leave much to be desired.

The analogy I like to use is that the sacramental couples sign up to be in the Church's army and have a specific additional purpose built into the structures of their marriage, while the non-sacramental marriages are not automatically "signed up," so to speak, for this purpose.