By John M. Grondelski
Each year, from February 7 to 14, is designated as «National Marriage Week,» an opportunity, at the individual, social, and cultural levels, to recommit to the institution of marriage. I deliberately choose the term «institution» of marriage because, in the controversies of the Reformation, whether marriage was a sacrament (that is, a privileged place of divine grace linked to salvation) or an institution (that is, an event sanctioned by God that marks a change in civil, not spiritual, status) was a point of controversy.
The Protestant reductionism of marriage to a civil institution, however, has undergone a further secular reductionism. What civil law in many Western countries calls «marriage» shares only the name with what Christians—and certainly Catholics—understood by that term.
The Protestant «state» of marriage, although primarily a civil reality, enjoyed divine sanction: what society today calls marriage neither recognizes its author nor necessarily even appeals to Him.
Traditionally, marriage was celebrated before a religious minister, in recognition of the origin of marriage and in supplication for the assistance of Him who makes His yoke easy and His burden light. Today, in many jurisdictions, it takes place before an «officiant» whose authority depends on Form 123A and a fee. In some places, no separate officiant is even needed: the parties can simply exchange vows with each other.
So that revisionist Catholic theologians do not announce that this reflects Catholic teaching (that the parties themselves administer the sacrament to each other), let us not forget that the very reason the Church required marriage before a priest and witnesses as a condition of validity was to put an end to the abuse of clandestine marriage. Today, some might simply call it «privacy.»
Speaking of vows, the ritual formula «I, A., take you, B., as my lawful husband/wife» is just one variant among many. There is now a whole subindustry within the Wedding Industrial Complex that will write your vows for you, according to the effect you desire: romantic, nostalgic, eccentric, humorous, or with prenuptial legal jargon.
Custom-made vows reflect a deeper problem: the relativization of marriage. In many ways, contemporary marriage has become a shell, a mere label that adheres to whatever two people want. The consequence of that turn has been that marriage is increasingly a form without content.
Civil law still retains some limits. Divorce is still not as simple as saying «I divorce you» three times, although no-fault divorce essentially allows one party to end the marriage regardless of what the other wants. The remnants—children and property—may be subject to dispute, but the institution that encompassed them—marriage—is dissolved.
One could argue that the main reason we have not arrived at unilateral divorce of the «I divorce you» type is to protect lawyers’ contingency fees.
DIY vows, however, express another aspect of this radical privatization of marriage. If vows can be reduced to an improvised monologue, when is any binding mutual commitment expressed regarding the essential characteristics and notes of marriage?
The Church required vows as an expression of the parties’ free consent to marry. But Pope Pius XI taught in Casti connubii that marriage involves the acceptance of what marriage is in itself. In other words, John is free to marry Mary or Anne, but he is not free to marry «for five years, automatically renewable unless objections are raised.»
And yet, that is where human resistance to marriage has generally focused. It is the characteristics of marriage that the Church teaches as sine qua non for the existence of marriage that become the target. Unity, exclusivity, indissolubility, fruitfulness: that is where marriage is attacked.
Which characteristics are assaulted and where seems to be largely a matter of cultural geography. «Accompaniment» theologians in Africa may advocate tolerance of polygamy that (still) has no place in America.
«Indissolubility» in America becomes the shell of successive polygamy: one can have multiple spouses over the concurrent lifetimes of one and the other, as long as they are not simultaneous, that is, after a stopover in divorce court.
Read the elite media—including «mainstream» ones like The New York Times—and you will find a growing flirtation with «polyamory» as the new frontier in «marital» sexual relationships.
Adultery is no longer an act, but the absence of sought and received consent. Obergefell pretended that marriage and parenthood have only an accidental, sometimes fortuitous, relationship, until the subsequent claim arose that not facilitating «parenthood» for inherently sterile «marriages» constitutes «discrimination.»
Meanwhile, public discourse expresses increasingly discouraging words about the future of America and the West. People are not having children. Western nations are collapsing demographically, while the dominant solutions involve importing replacement populations from immigrants or imagining a baby boom if we simply increased the Earned Income Tax Credit.
To preserve our libertine lifestyle, we avoid questioning the error of Obergefell: that parenthood and marriage lack inherent connections. Having more children in a healthy society means getting more people to marry. That implies that discussions about marriage and parenthood cannot be dismissed as «value-laden private issues.»
Christian theology affirmed that society has an inherent interest in marriage and parenthood issues because that is how a society continues to exist. And society has the right to speak on its own survival and continuity. That is why «National Marriage Week» has great sociocultural importance.
That said, part of the problem is that «marriage» has become an equivocal term: we use a word about whose essential elements society increasingly lacks agreement. An example: this year’s National Marriage Week theme. On the website of its main sponsor in the United States, the slogan is «Together with Purpose.» On the website of the Catholic Conference, the slogan is «Male and female he created them: together with purpose.»
So, are we «together with purpose» in marriage as sexually differentiated or simply as two separate individuals? Isn’t that answer important to know what marriage is and to understand what we are celebrating this week?
About the author
John Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) is former associate dean of the School of Theology at Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. All opinions expressed here are exclusively his own.