"Our chief duty is to watch and to labour, so that in our nation too, family life may be preserved and maintained in all its purity, innocence and vigour."

Josip Juraj Strossmayer

According to Strossmayer, the family and the family home are a place of warmth and love, and as such are irreplaceable for society and the Church. In His wisdom, God grants to individual nations particular families from which the great figures of history then emerge, all for the purpose of fulfilling God’s designs. Strossmayer interprets the expression "the home" as that place which the Catholic Church has always sought to transform into a "domestic church": "The faithful will contribute to the wellbeing of the nation if they carry out their sacred duty by turning their homes into living images of the house of Nazareth, and if ‘parents and elders become, in some manner, domestic priests to their young.’" Such families have the task of preserving and maintaining, in their own homes, faith, prayer and devotion: "Those, gentlemen, who bore and raised us, who gave us our body and bodily life and nourished it, are worthy of our eternal recognition, our eternal gratitude; but those who provide us with the means to a higher formation of the soul give us a higher life, one that is worth as much more than the first as heaven is worth more than earth, the spirit more than the body, the goods of the soul more than the goods of the body. These are our spiritual parents, to whom we can never show recognition enough, nor gratitude enough."

Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer wrote frequently about marriage and the family during his episcopal ministry. Through his sharp reaction against all those who threatened marriage and the family, his clear call to priests to fight against this, and his persistent encouragement of the faithful to remain true to Christian attitudes concerning marriage and the family, he showed his pastoral care for the flock entrusted to him. He was aware of the fact that the survival of a nation depends on the survival of the family and its inner structure, founded on the sacrament of marriage. He therefore used his Lenten addresses to urge priests to persevere in teaching the faithful about the importance and the sublimity of Christian marriage.

The source of Christian marriage is a holiness that gives rise to unity, and this unity and holiness together are permanently bound by indissolubility. In Strossmayer’s view, it is beyond doubt that holiness lies in the very nature of marriage itself, and he finds proof of this in Holy Scripture, which, in both the Old and New Testaments, speaks of the holiness of marriage as given to it by God himself. The family is, in a sense, a domestic church, and Jesus, in the process of redeeming the human race, came among men and lived within a concrete family, thereby sanctifying every family, and through his love for the Church laid the foundation for the sacramentality of marriage and the model for marital relationships. To priests he declared: "We must therefore implant in the soul of the people a love and devotion towards the holy mystery of marriage so strong that no laws and no institutions are capable of turning them away from it." According to the bishop, the holiness of Christian marriage is inseparably bound up with purity and indissolubility, and it is precisely this that troubles many people, who therefore try to present it as outdated, while at the same time promoting the dissolution of church marriage and the contracting of a new, civil one.

Explaining the oneness of marriage, Bishop Strossmayer appeals to Holy Scripture (Mt 19), where Jesus clearly tells the Jews that oneness is one of the essential components of marriage, and that nothing may or should encroach upon this part of the marital bond. He points out how an attempt to change such a stance ends, citing Henry VIII, whose sin of multiple marriages was the occasion for the Church in England breaking away from Rome. Strossmayer warns the Croats not to look for such sinful examples abroad, but simply to look at the regions beyond the Una and the Sava and see for themselves the sins of polygamy there. "Forgive me, brothers and friends, for repeating the same thing so many times. I repeat it because it is of immeasurable importance for the happiness and progress of our nation."

The third essential component of Christian marriage is indissolubility, which Bishop Strossmayer interprets as a natural consequence of the holiness and the oneness of marriage. Strossmayer reminds us that marital consent is given until death, and that spouses should always be aware of this. At the same time, the bishop recognises and acknowledges certain irregular and difficult situations in which the innocent party suffers and is unable to achieve their life’s purpose. He stresses that adultery cannot be accepted as grounds for the complete dissolution of the marital bond, even in favour of the innocent party, since this could be abused by unscrupulous individuals who would make use of it whenever they wished to dissolve their marriage. Strossmayer points to a frequent problem occurring in towns, involving people who have grown tired of their marital bond and go off to other neighbouring countries, convert to a new faith, and contract a new marriage. "Under no circumstances may the Christian people remain unaware that such marriages always stand before God and the Church as a true sacrilege, to the untold harm of family and state." He speaks explicitly of the problem of the indissolubility of marriage, that is, of the condition of those living with a second wife or a second husband while their first spouse is still alive. Strossmayer was deeply shaken by such developments within his diocese, and expresses this observation of his as follows: "I cannot recall ever having written anything with such sorrow and grief of soul as I write this now. It seems to me as though I am writing not with ordinary ink, but with my own bitter tears and blood."

In his interpretation, the bishop starts from the premise that the family is the first, natural and most sacred society. It is the true and living image of society and the state. This means, at the same time, that society and the state will be as advanced as their families are advanced. The family can, and rightly should, be regarded as a domestic church and a domestic school, and of anyone who would attempt to threaten this, Strossmayer says: "Accursed indeed must be the one who touches the holy system of the family, its holiness and purity, its unity and its fidelity, its indissolubility and its permanence." These words show his determination to pay due respect to the family, while at the same time preparing his listeners for the further part of his address, in which he explains the role and place of children and women within families.

Strossmayer begins his address on children with a comparison according to which children are the living image and likeness of their parents. After death, parents remain present, in a certain sense, in their children. Children carry not only their parents’ name and inheritance, but also their parents’ honour. For this reason, parents are duty-bound to raise their children properly, so that the future of society and the state may be happy and blessed. Strossmayer recalls the horror felt at the killing of Christian children and women in the Roman colosseums, or the neglect of children in China, and the children condemned to hunger and death, and he also says that the immense multitude of children in developed, Christian industrial countries who perform hard labour in factories, exposed to many injustices and illnesses and consequently dying very young, is being forgotten. The situation is not much better for women either, who are neglected and separated from their families, labouring hard in these same factories alongside men and gradually drifting into an abnormal way of life. Strossmayer calls such exploitation of children and women a mortal sin against God and against humanity. Priests have a duty to pray to God with all their hearts to soften the hearts of these hardened souls, and to stir, through his Spirit, Christian statesmen to prevent the torment of children and women.

Christian marriage is of particular importance, since through it the Church is not only renewed throughout history, but also spreads. Through Christian marriage, spouses and the children born of such a union become partakers of the supreme honour and dignity with which God has sealed Christian marriage. Strossmayer explains how Jesus in fact brought about a fundamental shift in the view of marriage. The husband received an authoritative and lasting model in Jesus, who hung upon the cross for the sake of his bride, the Church. Through the mystery of marriage, the woman within the family gained even more, having until then been in a position without rights. According to the belief of the time, only the woman was required to be faithful in marriage, while husbands were permitted infidelity. Jesus, however, overturned this into new relationships, into principles of justice between husband and wife, saying that the same was permitted, and the same forbidden, to both husband and wife. On the basis of these facts, Strossmayer wants to convey just how much dignity women gained through Christianity, a dignity which no one before could have even imagined, let alone granted to women. For these reasons he addresses himself in particular to the women of the Croatian nation with this appeal: "I would very much wish that, among us and within our nation, the gentler sex would take this to heart, and remember well that all the depraved assaults upon the mysterious character of Christian marriage are, in essence, nothing other than assaults upon that very honour and that very right which Christianity has won and guaranteed to women for all time. "

Strossmayer points out that the renewal of the family brought with it the renewal of society and the state, and that for this reason the mysterious character of Christian marriage is the image and source of all the goods enjoyed within society and within the Christian state; he then asks whether marriage between a baptised and an unbaptised person can correspond to this sublime purpose. Appealing to St Paul, he asserts that it cannot, since, precisely according to Paul, Christian marriage must be a living image of the communion between Jesus Christ on the one hand, and the Church and the human race on the other. Strossmayer expresses astonishment at the stance of certain individuals who make use of non-existent proofs, according to which the right to Christian marriage was lent to the Church by the state, and can therefore be taken back again by the state. He rejects such claims in the most decisive terms, recalling that the holiness and purity of the marital bond, established by God, was confirmed by Jesus and left to the Church as a legacy to guard, exercise and carry out for the benefit of the human race. For this reason, secular authority may not interfere in it, either directly or indirectly. Finally, he notes that marriage is a sacred bond by which two human beings are united forever into one being, for the holiest, most serious and purest of purposes. Each of these terms presupposes fidelity, purity, holiness and seriousness or, more briefly still, God and faith.

Strossmayer expresses the unity of marriage through the formula that in marriage holiness gives rise to unity, and holiness and unity, in a natural way, give rise to indissolubility. Inner unity is found in the soul and heart of the believer. This unity relates to the truth that there is one God, one Jesus, one Church, one baptism, one truth. Looking at the spouses themselves, he stresses that two people may and should be joined into one only through the holy and serious intention of sanctifying and perfecting one another, and that this mutual sanctification cannot be achieved without living faith and God’s law. According to Strossmayer, faith is so important in life that it can never be permitted that, upon entering marriage, it should have to be suppressed or forgotten on account of an unbelieving spouse. "Faithlessness can bring forth nothing else in this world but faithlessness again; instability, nothing but ruin; lust and licentiousness, nothing but corruption and destruction; contempt for God and God’s law, contempt for every authority and every human law."

The family should be a place of prayer, of Bible reading, of parents who by their own example show their children how to live, especially Christian mothers who should continually present their children to God and instil in them gratitude towards God. Strossmayer holds that children and young people should be brought up with discipline, but not a slavish discipline, rather one that flows from love – a discipline which, carried from the family home out into life and into the world, does not permit any weakness that would turn a person away from truth, from justice and from God. Such discipline is not possible in families where baptised and unbaptised persons live together, since in such families every law of God and faith is rejected. Marriage is older than any state authority and is the fruit of God’s will, not of human will. State authority has every right to adapt the civil aspects of marriage to its own purposes and intentions, but it has no right to interfere with the very essence of marriage. According to the Gospel, all are equal before God and redeemed at the same price, the blood of Christ. The only precedence that Jesus acknowledges is humility and service to others, not the imposing on others of a particular faith or marriage law that runs contrary to faith.

The greatness of Bishop Strossmayer is also shown in the fact that, long before his contemporaries, he understood the possible consequences of developments concerning marriage and the family. Not only did he understand this, but he acted decisively in the direction of protecting the dignity of Christian marriage and the Christian family. Such a decisive and clear stance is found again, after Strossmayer’s own, only at the Second Vatican Council, which, like Strossmayer, issued a call to everyone in the Church and in society to concern themselves with promoting the dignity of marriage and the family.