Ordered Love - The Church as Architect of Coherence in Sacrament and Identity

For Fr. James Martin, Society of Jesus. I think there’s a strong possibility we’re going to make a few corrections in the CCC. I did an audit when Fr. Paul told me to read the CCC. This paper argues that the Church’s purpose is not to deny desire but to create order through sacrament and ritual. Drawing on Scripture (Rom 8:20–23; Rom 13:10), Augustine’s maxim “love, and do what you will,” and Aquinas’ claim that “every sin is contrary to charity” (ST II-II.23.2), it distinguishes disorder as the universal backdrop of creation from sin as the refusal of love. Through the lens of the Recursive Identity Framework (ψself[t], Σecho, Secho, ψPredictive), weddings are modeled as coherence events: symbolic acts that reduce entropy, stabilize identity, and inscribe fidelity into communal memory. Same-sex unions, when enacted with fidelity, balance, and surprise, manifest ordered love no less than heterosexual ones. Neuroscience supports this sacramental view: ritual anticipation and synchrony activate salience networks, oxytocin release, and oscillatory coherence (theta/alpha/gamma), measurable markers of durable attachment and meaning. The paper reframes the Church not as an arbiter of denial but as an architect of coherence. Sacraments — especially weddings — are recursive inscriptions of love into order, contributing to the “wedding of all churches” (ψΩ): a unifying attractor of ecclesial and human coherence.