Where Are All The Catholic Marriages? Ctd

A number of readers shared their stories that might help explain the decline of Catholic marriages. One suspects “the rise of interfaith marriages” has played a role:

I’m Catholic, and my wife is Hindu. Since we were both active duty military officers, I had to apply for dispensation for disparity of cult (to marry a non-Christian) from the Archdiocese of the Military. We also had to get permission from the diocese where the wedding was to be held, since the original plan was to have both a Catholic and a Hindu ceremony.

The local diocese flatly refused to grant permission for my father, a Catholic deacon, to perform the ceremony outside of a church. This had nothing to do with Church policy writ large; it was just the local bishop’s personal hangup. Permission for similar situations is granted routinely in our home diocese. Since we were unwilling to relocate the ceremony, we were formally married by the Hindu priest and my father did a short Catholic blessing afterward. My marriage is still valid according to the Church, since I obtained dispensation, but I was unable to have a Catholic wedding without relocating the ceremony.

If this all sounds bitter, it’s not intentional. I think having the ceremony in a neutral setting was the right choice, allowing both families to feel comfortable. Still, I don’t think it’s an uncommon story. Since interfaith marriages are on the rise, it’s often easier for the couple to default to the non-Catholic’s tradition for the ceremony, since the Catholic Church requires you to navigate a lot of wickets to deviate from the standard.

Another reader claims that the Church is “completely out of step with the meanings that couples seek to create in their wedding ceremonies, as well as current social trends (e.g., couples living together before marriage)”:

When my wife and I got married in 1991, we chose a younger priest because he was supposedly in tune with young couples who believed in the social justice emphasis of the church. Instead, we got a curmudgeon who was suspicious that we dated for just five months before getting engaged — never mind that we scored in the 95th percentile on the compatibility test he used, and weren’t getting married for a full year after our engagement date. He was obsessed with finding out if we were living together (technically, we were, but we still had separate apartments to keep up appearances — what a waste of money for a young couple). He forced us to go through the full weekend-long pre-cana, where we slept in separate beds (of course) and wwhich was a complete waste of our time. (It also happened to be the first weekend of the Gulf War, and we were told to not worry about the news — the leaders would keep us posted. A bunch of us snuck down at midnight to watch the news.)

We weren’t allowed to use a Peter Gabriel song during the ceremony because it’s not part of the canon. He phoned in a generic homily instead of using anything that he learned about our goals, dreams, and interests over a year of meeting. And so on.

For a young couple who led an Amnesty International chapter and who were (and still are) dedicated to working for social justice, it was the last straw for us. We left the Catholic church after our marriage and have never looked back.

As a sociologist, I know to look for patterns, and yes, this is a data point of one. But I also know from talking to dozens of friends, students, and work colleagues over the years that our experience is not the exception to the rule.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the time that a priest wouldn’t let a bagpiper inside the church during a funeral, which was my dying father-in-law’s last wish. Instead, he had to play outside of the church after the official end of the mass, in a downpour.

Screw those guys.