While this post isn’t free from issues, I figured I would excerpt briefly from it. With online communities, there can be a bit of a Stockholm syndrome. From The Back Pew, on the exhortation from the Archbishop of Santa Fe:
…One of my friends, a coworker, told me about an experience he had at St. Pat’s in Charlotte a couple of weeks ago: the celebrant at mass used his homily to admonish those who came to Holy Communion disrespectfully, singling out parents who carried their infant children up to communion with them. He was one of those parents.
Priests who want their flock to abstain from birth control and wantonly reproduce need a reality check before getting pissy with parents who bring their kids to mass.
People are wired to marry young, and modern society no longer accommodates early marriage. Many couples who choose to live together before marriage do so for financial and situational reasons that some clergy are either unwilling or unable to understand. The Church’s lengthy requirements for marriage preparation (6-12 months, depending on the diocese) are irresponsible and impractical. Prior to the modern era, the Church’s marriage laws were actually laxer than they are now. If the Church wants to keep people from cohabitating, it should dispense with the classes and marriage encounters.
…
The archbishop’s statement that a person who cohabits cannot serve as a sponsor for baptism or confirmation is sketchy. He asks, “can anyone be seriously called a practicing Catholic who is not able to receive the sacraments because they are living in sin?”
Maybe Catholics in Santa Fe are a hell of a lot holier than they are out here in North Carolina, but I doubt the good Archbishop knows very many Catholics who are not “living in sin” one way or another.
Now I could demagogue this one and congratulate myself for not having cohabited. In fact, I think I deserve a cookie for not having done that one. Perhaps I’ll ride that one out to my grave. I’ll stand next to St. Peter and say let me through, my wife and I didn’t share a lease until after our wedding day. My apologizes for the touch of sarcasm here, but after nearly 11 years of marriage, it strikes me as one of those unimportant details. I don’t mean to be mistaken on this point. I don’t think cohabitation is healthy. I don’t think it is healthy in the same way 5 year engagements aren’t healthy. They show a lack of commitment. Add to that the children occasionally brought forth in these unions that suffer from the instability. I digress.
This is nothing new. These things have been referred to variously over the years. They have been called vulgar marriages. They’ve been called private marriages. They aren’t a modern invention by any means. Trent marked a demarcation point in practice. The actual canons of Trent aren’t as strict as what has become of the practice. While others have written more and better about this than what I will do here, the practice has become the Church has its life and the laity have their lives. So for example you can have someone like Newt Gingrich come into the Church and have all his prior marriages annulled since they were private and not governed under the rules of the Church. This occurs despite all the parties involved fully believing that Gingrich married the women and intended to do so. But that occurred in the lay realm so the Church doesn’t care.
Of course the laity don’t have the privilege of living in just the ecclesial world. They have to live with the consequences in the real world. Child support is awfully expensive and doesn’t go away with an annulment. Shared housing is poor and intended for college students, parolees, and losers, and so we find people who intend to one day have children and live together find principle to be reserved for the powerful and demagogues. Saving $5,000 or $10,000 for a wedding is easier to do while eating Ramen noodles with one rent check rather than two rent checks. (And let’s not argue over wedding costs. They are what they are.) There are also student loans to be repaid, cars to maintain, etc. I’m reminded of the devout Catholic man that decided seven children were enough and was snipped. The Church wasn’t paying for his children, and he needed to look out for his interests.
One of the bothersome things of these discussions is the paternalistic attitude of so many people. Their essence is that the Church suffers far more from bad marriages than the people involved, and so it has to guide folks lest idiots are allowed to marry. Another tack on this is that Catholic marriage is so much different than all those marriages you’ve seen advertised, so people need to be trained. This is usually dressed up in the theology of the body. Just as you don’t need to be an automotive engineer to drive a car, you don’t need to be a theologian to enjoy the marital life. The best drivers in the world aren’t automotive engineers. Some of the worst drivers are engineers. You could even extend this to just simply being a good Catholic. People want to dress it up as something extremely difficult. Vote for the Republicans, go to mass, and go to confession on occasion. Such isn’t to say that you can’t go deep in these topics. You can do so and do so profitably. Can does not equal ought. As I told someone in a long engagement: at your 10-year or 50-year wedding anniversary, no one is going to care that you were engaged for x years. For that matter, they aren’t going to care about your living arrangements the day before the wedding or if you were virgins going into it. And those difficulties in marriage, very rarely will their source be because it is Catholic.
Eventually you come around to doing what is in your best interests. And while I don’t think cohabitation is good, I can recognize that for many couples their interests align in having their household before their wedding date. I don’t really see the purpose of damning them for it. Perhaps people want that myth about young and orthodox storming the church to be true, and this is too inconvenient. For all the congratulations over the letter, I really don’t see the Church offering to be a part of the solution to the problem. And let’s be frank, the Church is more popular in certain circles when it creates further impediments to couples wanting to marry, which it has done over the past two decades.
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