Initiative will bolster marriage

American life
In his book, “The Marriage- Go-Round: The State of Mar-riage and the Family in America Today,” sociologist Andrew Cherlin points out that what is significant about American families as compared to those in other countries is their combination of “frequent marriage, frequent divorce” and the high number of “short-term cohabitating relationships.”

Taken together, Cherlin says, “these forces create a great turbulence in American life, a family flux, a coming and going of partners on a scale seen nowhere else.” While the intact two-parent family remains our cultural ideal, it exists under constant assault.

Disturbing stats
Thirty-five percent of marriages in the United States today end in divorce, many before the five-year mark. Cohabitating relationships have come to be seen as a preparation for marriage or as an alternative to it.

Perhaps most significantly, in May the Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported that births to unmarried women in our country have reached an astonishing 39.7 percent.

These startling statistics (and so many others) prompted Time Magazine to feature a cover story on July 13, 2009, written by Caitlin Flanagan. She states: “There is no other single force causing as much measurable hardship and human misery in this country as the collapse of marriage. It hurts children, it reduces mothers’ financial security and it has landed with particular devastation on those who can bear it least: the nation’s underclass.”

Flanagan notes that three presidents in a row (Clinton, Bush and Obama) have sought to address the problem of the number of poor who are uncoupling parenthood from marriage.

The reason for this presidential concern is simple: On every single significant indicator related to short-term well being and long-term success, children from intact two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households.

Suffer the children
When it comes to issues like drug abuse, school performance and dropout rates, teen pregnancies, criminal behavior and incarceration, children living with both parents dramatically outperform the others.

While the consequences of separation and divorce on children from more affluent households tend to be far less devastating than from poor ones, nevertheless, the children of divorced middle class parents do less well in school and at college compared with underprivileged kids from two-parent households.

Moreover, David Blanhen-horn, president of the Institute for American Values, points out that “it is dismissive of human experience that kids don’t suffer extraordinarily from divorce: Children have a primal need to know who they are, to love and be loved by the two people whose physical union brought them here.”

Blanhenhorn says that “to lose that connection, that sense of identity is to experience a wound that no child support check or fancy school can ever heal.”

Certainly, the importance of stable marriages and family life have been the 2,000-year tradition of our Church and of all the major religious traditions.

New initiative
But in light of the present-day pressures on marriage and family life, the bishops of the United States have made this concern one of the five priorities of our National Conference and have launched a National Pastoral Initiative on Marriage (NPIM) to bolster the sacred covenant of marriage.

The goal of this initiative is “to help create a positive climate that places healthy marriages at the heart of strong families, a strong nation and a strong and holy Church.”

For the past three years, the leadership of the initiative has been seeking to weave together our Catholic faith heritage and pastoral practice, the data of social science and the experience of married couples to offer guidance and resources to the members of our Church designed to promote, strengthen, sustain and restore marriages.

To achieve its goals, the initiative has conducted focus groups with married couples (including interfaith couples), separated or divorced persons, single young adults and couples in a second marriage, and with priests; dialogues with social scientists and theologians; consultation on “best practices” for marriage preparation and marriage enrichment; and a national research project on Catholics’ understanding of marriage.

In the nearly 200 focus groups conducted, the elements which people were most positive about in their marriage were shared faith and values, children, the place of mutual support and friendship, good communication, the support of extended family and the enjoyments of sharing an intimate relationship.

Couples’ challenges
Negative elements included financial challenges, balancing work and family time, caring for children and elderly parents, concerns about health care, domestic violence and addictive behaviors.

These focus groups and other research have revealed that most Catholics do not have a well-differentiated grasp of Church teachings. With some exceptions, they tend to think in generalities.

For example, many stated that the Church’s teaching about commitment and permanence is most affirming to them. They are able to find practical support in this when the going gets rough. Some also mentioned the Church’s teaching about marriage being a vocation, a graced path to holiness, as something from which they draw strength.

Not surprisingly, and across all the age cohorts of couples, we heard that Church teaching and discipline about contraception and about annulments present major challenges.

One response of the initiative to these concerns has been to develop a series of spots for radio and TV to proclaim the importance of marriage; to reposition it within societal understanding and popular imagination; to help couples and society re-discover marriage and to live it with realism and hope. (Just this week I heard one of these spots on ESPN radio and it was great!)

Later this month at our meeting in Baltimore, we bishops will be reviewing a draft pastoral letter on marriage, which we hope will communicate in contemporary language the Church’s teaching about the beauty, goodness and truth of marriage as revealing divine love.

Why marry
To underscore how high the stakes are for this initiative, let me conclude by citing again Caitlin Flanagan’s article in Time magazine. She writes: “The fundamental question we must ask ourselves at the beginning of the century is this: What is the purpose of marriage? Is it — given the game-changing realities of birth control, female equality and the fact that motherhood outside of marriage is no longer stigmatized — simply an institution that has the capacity to increase the pleasure of the adults who enter into it?

“If so, we might as well hold the wake now: There probably aren’t many people whose idea of 24-hour-a-day good times consists of being yoked to the same romantic partner, through bouts of stomach flu and depression, financial setbacks and emotional upsets, until, after many a long decade, one or the other eventually dies in harness.
“Or is marriage an institution that still hews to its old intention and function — to raise the next generation, to protect and teach it, to instill in it the habits of conduct and character that will ensure the generation’s own safe passage into adulthood?

“Think of it this way: The current generation of children, the one watching commitments between adults snap like dry twigs and observing parents who simply can’t be bothered to marry each other and who hence drift in and out of their children’s lives — that’s the generation who will be taking care of us when we are old. What we teach about the true meaning of marriage will determine a great deal about our fate.”

How true!