Holy Marriage as Apostolate: What the Ulmas and Priscilla and Aquila Reveal

On the night of March 24, 1944, German police arrived at a farmhouse in Markowa, a small village in occupied Poland. Inside, Blessed Joseph and Wiktoria Ulma were sheltering eight Jewish neighbors. Wiktoria was in the final weeks of her ninth month of pregnancy. The couple had six children asleep in the house. They had known the penalty for hiding Jews was death, and they had made their decision months earlier. That night, the soldiers executed Joseph, Wiktoria, the eight Jewish neighbors, all six children, and the unborn child Wiktoria was carrying at the moment of her death. On September 10, 2023, the entire family was beatified together as martyrs, in a ceremony widely reported as the first time an unborn child was included in a beatification.[^1]

Nineteen centuries earlier, a married couple made a comparable claim in a different key. Priscilla and Aquila, converts to Christianity living in Rome, resettled in Corinth after the emperor Claudius banned Jews from the city around A.D. 49. There they met Paul, shared his trade of tent-making, and traveled with him to Ephesus, where they hosted a church in their home. Benedict XVI, in a 2007 General Audience on the early Church, described how the couple met the gifted preacher Apollos in Ephesus and, recognizing gaps in his formation, "took him and expounded to him the way of God more accurately," after which he became a more effective evangelist.[^2] Paul writes that the couple "risked their necks" for his life. The New Testament mentions them together repeatedly, always as a pair acting jointly.

The structure behind the acts

What connects the Ulmas' decision to hide their neighbors with Priscilla and Aquila's decision to travel, host, and mentor? The answer lies in what Vatican II's decree on the apostolate of the laity, Apostolicam Actuositatem, articulated about the vocation of married couples. Since conjugal society is "the beginning and basis of human society," the decree calls spouses "cooperators in grace and witnesses of faith for each other, their children, and all others in their household."[^3] That witness begins within the marriage and extends outward. The Ulmas sheltering their neighbors, or Priscilla and Aquila hosting a church and mentoring a young preacher, are not exceptional departures from an otherwise private married life. They are the normal direction of conjugal love when it matures.

Karol Wojtyła developed the philosophical ground for this claim in Love and Responsibility and in the catecheses now gathered as the Theology of the Body. Titus, Nordling, and Vitz summarize his argument in their account of vocation: committed spousal love carries an obligation of justice running in two directions, horizontally between the spouses, who must relate to each other as persons rather than as means to an end, and vertically before God, the author of the order that makes the conjugal bond possible.[^4] A marriage that remains closed in on itself degrades, because love that refuses to extend toward others eventually instrumentalizes the other spouse. The outward movement is not an add-on to a working marriage. It is a condition of one.

Two acts of witness, one pattern

The Ulmas spent months before their deaths feeding and hiding eight people at mortal risk to themselves and their six children. Their action was not individual heroism laid over an otherwise ordinary domestic life; it grew directly from a prior understanding of what their shared life was for.

Priscilla and Aquila moved across the Roman Empire, opened their home as a place of assembly, and gave Apollos the catechetical formation he needed to preach more accurately. Benedict XVI's account of the episode presents their accompaniment of Apollos as a joint act, described in the New Testament without any effort to distinguish whose contribution was whose; Paul treats them throughout his letters as a single apostolic unit. Both couples, separated by centuries and circumstance, follow the same recognizable pattern: acts of charity or witness structurally inseparable from the shared life that produced them.

What their example argues

Vocation, as John Paul II developed it in Love and Responsibility, is the moment a person determines the direction of their entire capacity for self-giving.[^4] For married couples, that determination commits them not only to each other but to whatever the shared life requires of them in their particular place and time. For the Ulmas in 1944, it required hiding eight people and paying with their lives. For Priscilla and Aquila in the first century, it required uprooting from Rome, building a community in Corinth, and investing months in the formation of a single preacher. The pattern is the same: a shared life, oriented toward something beyond its own preservation, produces apostles. That is what these two marriages, read together, argue marriage is for.

References

[^1]: EWTN News, "A Month of Married Saints: July Brings Feast Days of Holy Husbands and Wives," September 10, 2023.

[^2]: Benedict XVI, General Audience, "Priscilla and Aquila," February 7, 2007, Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

[^3]: Second Vatican Council, Apostolicam Actuositatem: Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity (1965), §11.

[^4]: Craig Steven Titus, William J. Nordling, and Paul C. Vitz, "Fulfilled Through Vocation," in A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person: Integration with Psychology and Mental Health Practice (Divine Mercy University Press, 2020), pp. 210–248.