Posted on 06/27/2011 5:21:14 PM PDT by NYer
It is June — that time of year when many of us will be receiving wedding invitations. One thing that may have changed from years past is the likelihood that the address on that invitation is for a country club, beach or community center rather than a Catholic parish.
The number of marriages celebrated in the Church has fallen from 415,487 in 1972 to 168,400 in 2010 — a decrease of nearly 60 percent — while the U.S. Catholic population has increased by almost 17 million. To put this another way, this is a shift from 8.6 marriages per 1,000 U.S. Catholics in 1972 to 2.6 marriages per 1,000 Catholics in 2010.
The “crude marriage” rate (marriages per 1,000 of a population) for Catholics marrying in the Church is significantly different than the overall crude marriage rate of the United States. In 2009, the most recent data available, the crude marriage rate in the U.S. overall was 6.8 marriages per 1,000 people.
It’s not that Catholics are less likely to marry than non-Catholics. In 2010, 53 percent of Catholics surveyed in the General Social Survey (GSS) indicated that they were currently married. By comparison, 51 percent of non-Catholics surveyed were married (including 55 percent of Protestants and 43 percent of those without a religious affiliation). Instead, many Catholics are choosing to marry outside of the Church.
We can see this trend in polling data as well. In a 2007 survey conducted by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University, 46 percent of unmarried Catholics who indicated some likelihood of marrying in the future said it is “somewhat” or “very” important to them to marry in the Church.
There are some other trends that are leading to the declining numbers of marriages in the Church.
A smaller percentage of Catholics are choosing to marry at all. The percentage of Catholics in the GSS indicating that they are married dropped from 79 percent in 1972 to 53 percent in 2010. Among Catholics ages 18 to 40, this percentage dropped from 69 percent to 38 percent during this period.
Some of this can be explained by Catholics waiting longer to marry, but the shift here has been slight. In 1972, the average age at first marriage reported in the GSS for Catholics ages 18 to 40 was 20.9. In 2006 (the last time this question was asked), it was 23.9.
Thus, the decline in Church marriages is more about not marrying at all than marrying older. CARA’s 2007 survey on marriage provides some additional context. In this study, Catholics who had never married were asked, “How likely do you think it is that you will get married at some point in your life?” Twenty-four percent of these never-married Catholics responded, “not at all likely.”
Divorce is another factor in the growing gap between the overall crude marriage rate in the U.S. and in the Church. The percentage of adult Catholics who are divorced or separated, divorced and remarried or widowed increased from 8 percent in 1972 to 22 percent in 2010. Some who divorce get remarried in civil ceremonies without seeking an annulment. These marriages are included in the total number of marriages in the U.S. but couldn’t be celebrated in the Church.
Another factor is the increasing number of marriages among Catholics to spouses of another faith.
According to the 1991 GSS, 78 percent of married Catholics ages 40 and younger had a Catholic spouse. This dropped to 57 percent in 2008, with an increasing number of Catholics reporting a Protestant spouse (28 percent) or one with no religious affiliation (15 percent).
Some Catholics celebrate their interfaith marriage in the Church. The percentage of marriages celebrated in the Church between a Catholic and a non-Catholic has remained quite stable in recent decades. In 2009, 26 percent of marriages in the Church were between a Catholic and a non-Catholic.
The likelihood that a Catholic will marry a non-Catholic is related to how numerous other Catholics are in his or her community. In 2009, in dioceses in which Catholics were about 10 percent of the total population, the average percentage of marriages in the Church between a Catholic and non-Catholic was 41 percent. In dioceses in which 40 percent or more of the population was Catholic, only about 16 percent of marriages in the Church were interfaith.
Not all dioceses have experienced the same marriage-rate decline. Four reported an increase in their crude Catholic marriage rates in the last decade: Peoria, Ill. (4.2 marriages in the Church per 1,000 Catholics in 2000 compared with 5.2 in 2010), Monterey, Calif. (3.4 to 4.3), Amarillo, Texas (5.1 to 5.2), and Beaumont, Texas (3.7 to 3.8). However, in each of these dioceses the total number of marriages celebrated in the Church declined. The resulting increases in marriage rates are due to fewer numbers of Catholics living in these dioceses.
In six dioceses, the total number of marriages celebrated increased, but the marriage rate fell due to more rapidly growing Catholic populations. These include: Corpus Christi, Texas (222 more marriages in 2010 than in 2000), Charlotte, N.C. (+112), Brownsville, Texas (+30), Knoxville, Tenn. (+18), Raleigh, N.C. (+17), Lincoln, Neb. (+1).
In the 10 dioceses with the highest rates for Catholic marriage in 2010, mostly concentrated in middle America, the rates are similar to the total crude marriage rate in the U.S. (6.8 in 2009). In the dioceses with the lowest crude rates, many are likely choosing to marry outside the Church. It’s also possible that in the dioceses near the U.S.-Mexico border, some of the Catholic marriages may be occurring outside the diocese.
The Diocese of Las Vegas has the country’s lowest Catholic marriage rate (0.9 marriages in the Church per 1,000 Catholics). This may be related to the presence of the city of Las Vegas — said to be easiest place in the world to get married (outside the Church, that is).
Is it any wonder the definition of marriage is changing?
Not plummeting at my church. More marriages than ever.
Pray for the sanctity of the Sacrament of Matrimony.
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A lot of the growth in number of Catholics in this country is the Hispanic population which has a very large percentage of unwed mothers.
Oddly enough, I think there are far simpler reasons than most would expect.
Getting married in church is difficult. It is much more expensive, the expectations are sky high, it is intimidating as all get out, and for a lot of timid young couples, it is just too much.
There would be a lot more church weddings if everybody would just tone it down a little. And it is not really the church itself, or the Priest that is the problem, but everybody else.
One family that kind of put it in a nutshell had three children, an older son, a daughter, and a younger son. The parents and all their kin were planning a three ring circus for the oldest son, who was in the army.
With fair warning, he begged and pleaded with his fiancee to insist that they be married before he left the army, so it would be in a small, military chapel, by a Catholic chaplain, with just their assembled parents. It worked like a charm, and was a peaceful and enjoyable wedding.
But this meant that his parents and all the rest of their family redoubled their efforts to make the daughter’s marriage not just a circus, but with a parade, air show, etc.
By the time she was engaged, she and her fiance went to the length to actually leave the country to get married, going so far away that none of their parents could even attend and interfere. They hated to do it, but their parents had left them no choice.
So finally it all came down to the youngest son. He had been in on most of this, and wanted nothing to do with any of it, so despite considerable brow beating, he just announced that he was not going to marry at all. A good Catholic, he was not going to fool around, but if this is what it took to get married, it wasn’t worth it. And no, he wasn’t gay.
The dangerous epilogue to all of this is that this kind of pressure isn’t limited to just the marriage itself, but also when the couple want to have children. Everybody wants to get in on the act, and pressure the heck out of the couple. Which is one of the big reasons that the birthrate is declining.
You just can’t push around people like this without some of them just saying the heck with this, and “quitting”, as it were.
Massive, respectful disagreement with you on this point.
Parental pressure is hardly the reason why birthrates are declining. It has everything to do with respect for life, and having priorities wrong.
Nice indictment of Vatican II.
http://www.youtube.com/user/RealCatholicTV?feature=mhee#p/u/1/_Akkl9vMbYw
Whatever you may think of Michael Voris, I think he made good points on the subject.
Regards
It has long been known to demographers that when a country reaches a demographic plateau unique to it, the birthrate suddenly drops from many children per family to just 2.1 to 2.3, a maintenance level.
This is because previously, children amounted to both prosperity and retirement for a couple. But when they can afford to live by their work, or government and cultural support, they have fewer children, and seek to improve the quality of their children’s life.
However, this can be a problem in itself, because while government cannot typically inspire couples to have more children, government and culture can pressure people to have even *fewer* children. Often with the best intentions, the more requirements that are created to raise children “properly”, the fewer people will want to have children.
Right now, in the US, to age eighteen, it can cost between $150k and a quarter of a million dollars to raise a child.
And while parents of a couple may come in third behind government pressure and cultural pressure, it still rates as a reason to not have more children.
glad to hear the good news at your church.
( some credit to your Priest, who you said was very good? )
and great links, as usual. thanks!
others here do have some good points, about cost. (and annulments also can cost.) ...in the current economy,
some people simply can’t afford to get married in the Church.
reality bites. but when you’re trying to pay the rent and keep food on the table...
Do you happen to know the marriage rate for mothers with children out of wedlock? Several (white) women with my parish young adult group have had children in such circumstances, where the father is absent or unknown.
I sometimes wonder if our "pro-life" advice to keep the baby, not give it up for adoption, is just making these young women less marriageable. It's a sensitive issue to confront, especially since many more people have been born out of wedlock than there used to be.
And of course it's outright cruel to expect young people to be marriage-minded when we don't train them to shun the shady elements of pop culture and don't set an example in our own lives.
I've been volunteering in many aspects of pro-life activism over the last 15 years and I have never heard of encouragement to "keep the baby" being intended or interpreted in opposition to adoption. Not once. Also from what I have seen, it is the previous sexual activity regardless of the presence of a child that makes "these young women less marriageable." Your analysis might be confusing the causation behind these trends.
Getting married in church isn’t that difficult; it just stopped being important to many people (in the same way that Sunday Mass did). Many Catholics I know got married in church because of their parents’ wishes - nothing more. I’m shocked also at how many Catholics have children co-habitating, using the logic that you can’t tell a 30 year-old what to do. The hell you can’t.
The women are making a decision not to murder a child; whatever the consequences are in this world, they can’t hold a candle to the judgement of someone who has murdered a child. You’re right about the example we set; that also applies to attending Mass.
“Everybody wants to get in on the act, and pressure the heck out of the couple. Which is one of the big reasons that the birthrate is declining.”
The birthrate is declining because the idea of sacrifice is alien to many younger people; nothing disgusts me more than married people with few or no children (by choice) complaining about the number of non-English speakers they encounter. They fail to see the direct link between their actions and the obvious consequences. If the money spent on immigrants was instead needed for large American families, our southern border would be as tight as the Berlin Wall, and large numbers of American voters would ensure that it reamined so.
There were two weddings at my church last weekend, both from the Spanish-speaking congregation. There’s another next weekend, English-speaking people. Of course, it’s the time of year for it, but we have weddings in the parish regularly, and it’s not a place anyone would choose except that they’re parishioners: very utilitarian space.
I agree with kearnyirish2. Unless we’re Marxists and believe that anonymous economic forces control us all, we have no reason to attribute fewer marriages (and fewer children) to anything but active personal choice.
Weddings don’t have to be expensive. A Catholic wedding requires: a man and woman free to marry; a priest or deacon; two independent witnesses; a church. That could be you and your intended, your pastor, the secretary, and the custodian standing in the back of the church (or even in the office, depending on where it’s located). Costs less than a tank of gas.
People don’t have to choose consumer goods over children. Encouraging couples to believe that they’re the victims of random economic or cultural determinants, instead of agents making decisions, encourages them to be useless in every area of life. Something I do for my children, as my mother did for me, is to force them to make statements that take responsibility: statements that start, “I decided to ...,” or “I put myself in a position where ...”, rather than “I didn’t have a chance to,” or “I didn’t have any other choice.”
I’m not blaming the church one bit.
You wrote: “A Catholic wedding requires: a man and woman free to marry; a priest or deacon; two independent witnesses; a church.”
But you might have as well written “a man and a woman, both Catholic orphans no longer living with their adoptive parents, who no longer take an interest in their children’s lives...”
It’s contradictory to think that “good” Catholic parents, who have had an important hand in raising their children, shepherding through Baptism and Confirmation, and at least weekly church services, are somehow going to say, “Have a nice marriage! Your mother and I will be at home watching TV.”
And unlike their parents, who were probably broke when they were married, and had to scrimp and save to prosper; kids today are deeply in debt, having to pay off bloated student loans, years or a decade or more before they can hit the enviable position of “broke”.
“But your mother and I were planning to spend at least $30,000 on your wedding!”
I was exaggerating a little, to emphasize my point that marriage does not require a large expenditure on a ceremony. My husband and I will, of course, attend our daughter's wedding (in the church office, in her military uniform), and take her and the young man out to lunch afterward with anyone else who wants to go.
Yes, I'm exaggerating there, too, although Anoreth did say she wouldn't get married if it required a princess movie set, and was relieved to hear that "in your uniform on a Tuesday with the deacon by the door" was just as legit. We agree that "being married" is more important than "having a wedding," and that a wedding is an insane use of $30,000, not that other people can't do that if they want to.
People think we're insane for having nine children so far (see "more important than consumer goods") so it goes both ways.
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