A DYING RITUAL: CATHOLIC WEDDINGS?

Tis’ the month of June and the season of weddings. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer Catholics are choosing “the Church route” for those June weddings, or any other month, for that matter, according to the Center of Applied Research for the Apostolate at Georgetown University, which keeps records of such things going back to the 1960’s. In 1965 there were 347,179 sacramental marriages performed in the United States, i.e., marriages entered into the official canonical church records. In 2022 there were 98,354 such weddings, or 28% of the 1965 total—and this does not factor in the rise in the population since 1965. CARA’s Catholic statistics on all aspects of Church life in the U.S. are available to the public free online but pour yourself a stiff belt before you read all the bad news.
 
I am going to slip into my “inner Canon Lawyer mode” for a moment and wonder out loud if anyone has considered the possibility [probability?] that, in the eyes of Church/Canon Law, statistically speaking, at least a majority of baptized Catholics are living in concubinage as the Canons would define it? Look at the law:
 
Can. 1108 §1 Only those marriages are [sacramentally] valid which are contracted in the presence of the local Ordinary [bishop] or parish priest or of the priest or deacon delegated by either of them, in the presence of two witnesses.
 
And
 
Canon 1127 §2: If there are grave difficulties in the way of observing the canonical form [the presence of a priest/deacon and two witnesses], the local Ordinary of the catholic party has the right to dispense from it in individual cases…for validity, however, some public form of celebration is required. It is for the Episcopal Conference [in the United States, the USCCB] to establish norms whereby this dispensation may be granted in a uniform manner.
 
In other words, the local bishop can grant a “dispensation from form” allowing a Catholic to be married in a Protestant Church before that church’s minister, or even before a civil official, if there is good reason and the proper permissions have been signed off by the bishop. This dispensation is required for validity of the Catholic sacrament! Attached here is the Dispensation from Form request to the Archbishop of Los Angeles. I filled out such forms in my years as pastor for episcopal permission, but it was still my responsibility as pastor of the Catholic bride or groom to do the premarital investigations for freedom to marry, collect the baptismal certificates, record the marriage in my parish’s canonical books, notify the Catholic party’s church of baptism, and perform the premarital counseling for the couple. Interestingly, the Protestant minister who was performing the ceremony was often doing his due diligence, too, and conducting premarital counseling while I was doing mine. We put those folks through a lot. [USCCB research indicates that the best long-term results of premarital counseling are obtained by 8-9 sessions.]  By the way, if a Catholic seeks to marry a member of a non-Christian religion—such as a Jewish or Islamic believer, or an unbaptized person, there is different paperwork for what is called a “disparity of cult” dispensation—a bishop’s permission to marry a party outside of Christian baptism.]
 
Catholic moral teaching holds that for baptized Catholics, any sexual activity outside of a valid marriage is mortally sinful. Consequently, if most Catholics today are marrying ‘outside the church” as the statistics from CARA and the anecdotal reporting of local churches would seem to establish, then large numbers of our Catholic neighbors and families are “living in sin,” as we say in Catholic circles. Or are they? And we have not even factored in the pastoral situations of couples living together before marriage.
 
BUT BEFORE WE BREAK THE EMERGENCY GLASS…
 
Before we get into the subject of marriage per se, let us reflect for a moment on the nature of mortal sin. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraph 1857, defines mortal sin thusly: “For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: "Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter, and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent." No argument that matters of marriage are matters of high importance for both church and society. But it is the next two issues that deserve closer scrutiny. “Full knowledge” implies that an individual knows the law, understands the law, and how that law applies to one’s personal situation. Full consent follows from the previous point: armed with the knowledge of the teachings and values at hand, an individual chooses to disobey Church teaching from a motivation of scorn or contempt for Revelation and its legitimate officers. I doubt that Catholics are aware of the multiple conditions for sinning; I have often thought that the psychology of committing a mortal sin is a lot more complicated than we acknowledge, and perhaps we should draw some comfort from that.
 
I am going to make the argument that the vast majority of the brides and grooms make their marriage plans with no contempt for Canon Law or Catholic sacramental theology. Rather, their formation to the faith and their inclusion into the Catholic worship has been so deficient or even absent from their lives that marriage—like many other of life’s key decisions—is totally disconnected from Catholic culture and tradition. Interestingly, the USCCB admits as much. In its own hired research, it found: “Although parents continue to be instrumental in the formation of healthy relational skills and attitudes during this period, many [diocesan marriage preparation] policies refer to the value of classroom instruction in marriage and family life during junior high, high school, and college.” And yet, what is one of the greatest frustrations of parish personnel? That their eighth-grade confirmands fly the coup out the church door even ahead of the ordaining bishop! Thus, in the years of peak formative values of young adults on matters of love, relationships, and marriage, the Church is a non-player. I will return to this thought in a moment.
 
I had the opportunity recently to hear Kenneth Woodward, longtime religion editor of Newsweek and the dean of Catholic editorialists in the United States. Woodward, in an address to diocesan priests, made the point that since Vatican II each generation of Catholics has been exponentially less educated in the rudiments of Catholic life than the previous one. I cannot argue with that; when I was doing weekend workshops for adult catechists in my diocese, I was frequently surprised by what my students did not know in terms of what I always thought to be general Catholic household knowledge. I was delighted that that they had the courage to ask, and I welcomed the questions, but in the back of your mind is always that haunting question, “Quis custodes custodiet?” [“Who will shepherd the shepherds?”] Put another way, parochial catechetics in general are dissolving in content and competence.
 
SO WHY ARE SO MANY UNCATECHIZED AND/OR LEAVING CATHOLIC PRACTICE?
 
In discussions of this sort, I am always reminded of the scene in “Godfather I” where Vito Corleone begins a meeting with the heads of the five families: “Gentlemen, how did things get so far?” Looking for answers, I tend to agree with John Tracy Ellis’s famous 1955 essay on the intellectual state of the Catholic Church in the United States as a place to start. Ellis, a renowned priest historian, shook the American Church when he wrote in effect, that intellectually speaking, Catholicism in the United States was a mile wide and a foot deep.
 
[From America Magazine cited above, 1995] Ellis took as his starting point a comment by Denis W. Brogan, the Cambridge political scientist who was an expert on both modern French and American history. Brogan had said in 1941 that "in no Western society is the intellectual prestige of Catholicism lower than in the country where, in such respects as wealth, numbers, and strength of organization, it is so powerful." More in sorrow than in anger, Ellis commented: "No well-informed American Catholic will attempt to challenge that statement." It does break my heart to see the general low regard for Catholic scholarship and the very limited opportunities for adult study and faith formation at the diocesan and parish level, because all this deficiency percolates downward into family life and the faith formation of children. How can we be surprised that many Catholics know next to nothing about marriage theology and pastoral opportunity when the bishops in the United States are spending $28 million to reeducate American Catholics to the very central doctrine of Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist?
 
Ellis argued that the American Catholic Church has been more pragmatic than thoughtful. In 1955 he pointed out that there were vast numbers of Catholic colleges and seminaries in the U.S. but a dearth of worthy intellectuals and scholars to staff them. This was [and remains] very true in most seminaries, with the result that many pastors today are unread, preach poorly, and have little intellectual meat to offer college-educated congregations, including inquisitive youth. [At the Mass I attended on the Feast of the Holy Trinity, the priest homilist told us that book learning does not lead to faith…which would have been quite a shock to Augustine, Aquinas, Newman, and Benedict XVI, the latter a professional theologian and writer before his elevation to the papacy.]
 
To make this point personal, I cite a 2017 America essay on religious education, where a 40-year Director of Religious Education, Ernie Sherretta, wrote this reader response, sharing his experience as a Catholic parent of adult children:
 
My own adult children were raised in a "traditional Catholic" household, if I may say so, and yet they abandoned the Church, each marrying in another denomination and each holding the values/virtues they were taught. They married faith-filled spouses and now worship and serve in ministries of their new denominations. As adults, I respect their choices but asked why, having a suspicion as to the answer. My suspicions were confirmed when they stated that the Catholic Church is behind the times- not so much due to doctrine- which never was a problem due to its irrelevance to their lives but due to a structure that is patriarchal, authoritarian, and not very inclusive. Having participated in their weddings, one at a Presbyterian and the other at a Methodist church, I do understand their preference for another Church community. Another insight that comes from my own 68 years of being a Catholic, is the Church's refusal to incorporate Vatican II, incorporate all the baptized in leadership roles, not just as liturgical ministers, or council/staff members but as pastors, bishops etc. and rid itself of a clerical mindset still attached to the garb and nomenclature of the Middle Ages. Today's adults are no longer the "pay, pray and obey" people our parents and grandparents were and refuse to acquiesce to titles and procedures no longer relevant to the modern world. Catechesis, no matter how new, no matter what venue will not compensate for example, and the experience of inclusion which Jesus exemplified, and which affirms their baptismal anointing of priest, prophet, and king. In other denominations, they see lay leaders, modern worship, and members living in the real world not in convents, monasteries, rectories, or the Vatican. Sorry, but Roman Catholicism is on the path to extinction while the followers of Jesus continue to light the way through personal witness and ministry.
 
Some of the language here is strong, and it is painful to hear a church minister with so much “skin in the game” question the viability of the ecclesiastical body he has devoted his life to serving. But I think he is representative of not just church ministers, but of the much greater number of Catholic parents of roughly my generation [he is 68, I am 75] whose children and grandchildren have opted for other ways to live their values. I discussed earlier the issue of young people being poorly catechized to Catholic life. But what about those who were immersed in the Catholic culture and then opted out of the Church for another Christian communion or other vehicles in their search for meaning, as Mr. Sherretta’s children did?
 
I noted in his response the author’s observation that his children left the Church “not so much due to doctrine- which never was a problem due to its irrelevance to their lives…” That is a telling admission that we can assume nothing, really, about the effectiveness of our present modes of catechetical formation. In my parish—and in many across the country—there was no effort to conduct synodal listening. Can you imagine, as part of the synodal process, if an independent facilitator had spent a private evening with just each religious education class, without the teacher present--and with the Catholic school students, for that matter—and asked them point blank what they thought and experienced in religious education class, or even more pointedly, at Mass? The very thought of it answers the question of why so many American church leaders wimped out of the process.
 
To suggest that all these folks like Mr. Sherretta’s children who have moved in different directions from Catholicism are in dire danger of hell fire because of their canonical marriage status is ludicrous, and I hope that no parent lives under the shadow of that fear. They, like those of us who still practice, do what they need to do to discover the ultimate meaning of our existence. They, like us, will be judged at the end of time by the criteria set by Jesus himself in reference to the Last Judgment [Matthew 25: 31-46], and it sounds like Mr. Sherretta’s children take the Gospel very seriously. We must assume that barring evidence to the contrary, those who choose other paths to God do so in good faith. The early philosophers of Christianity—those guys it is a waste of time to read, according to some—understood, as an anthropological principle, that every human possessed an innate drive for the good, the true, and the beautiful, even before the saving waters of baptism.
 
The numerical decline in Catholic weddings is quite sobering, perhaps more so because it is not an outlier but a reflection of the reality of semper reformanda across the board. But marriage does deserve special attention: it is the most significant relationship that any of us will ever enter, and in the last millennium the Church has designated marriage as one of its seven sacraments or “events that save.” Those of us who are married know that we are “saved” daily by this relationship, in much the same way one is saved daily by holy communion. So, in the next installment on this theme, in a week or two, I would like to muse about Catholic marriage, the before, the during, and even the after.