February 7-14 is observed this year as National Marriage Week, intended to promote awareness and appreciation of the institution of marriage. The effort seems particularly timely, given the decline in people getting married (and having children) and marriage’s competition with other forms of “relationship” more or less permanent.
One need not be particularly prescient to recognize that marriage in contemporary Western societies is on the ropes. The question is why. One answer may be the idea that marriage was the original sanctuary jurisdiction.
When he ushered in a new “reform” Criminal Code in 1967, then-Canadian Justice and later Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau opined that “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” According to Trudeau, “contemporary society” needed to eliminate the “totems” and “taboos” he deemed restrictions on abortion and homosexual activity represented.
Trudeau’s dictum embodied liberal ideas of the times about the undesirability of civil law protecting and privileging marriage and procreation against the individual lifestyle libertinism increasingly ascendant in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The American counterpart to Trudeau’s bedroom sanctuary policy was Roe v. Wade, which, at its apogee, likewise insisted the state in practice had no “interest” in “potential life” in the womb.
The logic behind these exclusions of social norms from marriage and procreation was precisely the idea that there could be no social norms about them. Good liberal democrats, particularly in the Rawlsian tradition, could not impose a normative or objective concept of the good on an individual’s subjective ones. “Let a thousand forms of good bloom” pretended that human liberty would live long and prosper when cultivated in diverse and variegated forms.
What instead happened was a peculiar blend of the iron law of noncontradiction with Gresham’s Law: if incompatible forms of marriage are all on offer as equally good, the subjective will drive out the objective, the easier will push aside the demanding. If real marriage, partnerships, concubinage, common law marriage, “pre-ceremonial intercourse,” one-night stands, and hook-ups are all on offer with the law in practice indifferent about them, then de gustibus non disputandum. But don’t be surprised when real marriage suffers.
The bizarre part is that this all happened in countries that, at the time, were still coasting on Protestant gases. I would argue, however, that it is precisely because these countries were Protestant that the evisceration of the content and characteristics of marriage could take place.
Classical Protestant theology, with its sola Scriptura obsessions and nominalist intellectual foundation, denied the sacramentality of marriage. Marriage was an “estate” regulating one’s civil situation; it had nothing inherently to do with salvation. It might be “holy” in the sense of obedience to God’s ordering of temporal human affairs, but it had no intrinsic significance (other than the test of obedience) beyond this world.
If marriage is not part of the sacramental order, it becomes part of the temporal order, which means it becomes a matter of state, not ecclesiastical control. And that is just what the classical Protestant Reformers recommended and accomplished. The early Protestant rulers who buttressed the Protestant Reformers inherited an understanding of marriage that they at least thought was God’s design for that “estate.” But here’s where nominalism enters the picture.
Nominalism asserted that creation is the result of the omnipotent divine will: God made the world as He willed it, but could have made it otherwise. The commandments, then, are essentially arbitrary: an all-powerful God could have made them the exact opposite. He just didn’t. This is, of course, at variance with a classical Catholic metaphysic, which recognizes that God–even an all-powerful God–cannot make a world at odds with Himself. A God who is Life cannot create a moral order in which killing is good. A God who is Truth cannot create a world in which lying is allowed.
Nominalism essentially reduces reality to labels attached by an all-powerful God. It accustoms people to thinking that reality (like marriage) has no inherent meanings, just characteristics that are the result of external forces, be they God, socio-cultural conditioning, tradition, or whatever. Nominalism works as long as people actually believe in God as the one who affixes the labels. But when men lose their faith in God (as in the view the Enlightenment ushered in), who is going to attach the labels? The likely candidate is men who want to play God, men who still think reality is inherently meaningless, and look for somebody to attach labels.
If marriage, which the Protestant Reformers moved from church to state control, is now increasingly separated from God’s commands, then it will be up to men to decide what characteristics belong to marriage. An English king who did not necessarily like his wife du jour could do without indissolubility. A primary-schooled farmer from northern New York could decide some archangel gave him a “revelation” about the value of polygamy. A group of Protestant clergy (later abetted by Catholics) might decide that marriage and openness to procreation did not necessarily go together.
And once that principle is gone, Biblical “scholars” imbibing “higher criticism” could then conclude that even sexual differentiation is irrelevant to marriage. And it’s all “legitimate” because the law–once God’s but now man’s–sanctions it.
Marriage progressively has deteriorated from a shared common understanding deriving from God’s design for the institution to a highly individualistic idea that, as long as the individual calls it marriage, society is eventually expected to sanction it amidst a “diversity” of views. A paradoxical situation is created: “marriage” is declared a social institution that society sanctions and nominally promotes, but there is no common social understanding of what marriage is. If–contrary to the Catholic view–marriage essentially remains two individuals who do not finally and indissolubly become one, then are we surprised that our idea of “society” also is progressively losing a communal character, reducing itself to an aggregate of individuals whose interests are at best coordinated but rarely common?
Arguably, one can claim that the privatization of marriage has been one of the prime engines in the atomization of what we still call “society.” If marriage is justified by callow appeals to “love is love”–with love being whatever somebody says it is at a given moment–then marriage has little to no social content or meaning. The “common good” is then redefined as whatever individuals want. And a “democratic society” protects those wants, so that the government must “stay out of the bedroom.”
“Staying out of the bedroom” has meant removing any social and moral consensus about what marriage is and requires. Defenders of this “sanctuary” model of marriage claim that “as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody, we should not interfere with individual choices.”
But does the record of the past 60 years–the era since the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s–bear out the claim nobody’s been hurt by the Rawlsian model of no public morality interfering with lifestyle choices? The situation of spouses suggests otherwise. Society’s failure to reprobate adultery by defending marriage has led to divorce regimes whose protection of marriage is less robust than your mortgage obligations. Society’s failure to condemn fornication has led to single parents (primarily single mothers) living in poor economic situations and usually on the public dole. Society’s failure to recognize the mutual partnership of persons in the creation of life has led to the bizarre model, sanctioned after Roe and curiously unchallenged by states in the post-Dobbs era, that fathers have no say in life or death decisions about their unborn child.
More importantly, our “victimless” approach to marriage, in which a “sanctuary” mentality excludes social and moral consensus, victimizes children. Numerous studies show how children fail to thrive–socially, intellectually, economically–when deprived of marriage. The more basic rights issue, which society eschews, is that a child has a right to a mother and a father to whom he is biologically related. Once a couple agrees to engage in sexual intercourse–an act that has the potential of giving life–they assume obligations towards the child who may come from that act. Our society’s failure to do so, its claim that there is no entitlement right on the part of the child vis-à-vis his parents, is at the heart of the current marital/parental crisis.
Instead, we continue to labor under a false anthropology that considers parenthood merely an “individual choice” (which, however, cannot happen through but one individual) about which no one else has a right to opine. It is precisely this distorted anthropology that fuels so much of modernity’s problems.
Finally, a major flaw in modern approaches to marriage and family is the idea that society as a community can have no views on the matter. This “hands-off” approach to the “privacy” of family decisions is alien to most of human culture. It is certainly alien to Catholic thought and even to the Protestant ideas that fueled much of the American founding. Society rests on the family. Society exists because of the family. Because anything that exists has a legitimate interest in its continued existence and perpetuation, the idea that marriage and family are somehow excluded from social consensus is irrational.
Yet this is the reason why, despite all the evidence that the policies with which moderns have surrounded marriage and parenthood are imploding, we continue to cling to them and refuse to change. Part of the problem is the commitment of no small part of the political establishment that denies there can be a normative vision of marriage and family. Part of the problem is the fear of “alienating” some constituency. Part of the problem is the refusal to define terms like “marriage” and “parenthood.”
Until we arrive at some degree of social clarity on these matters, we will continue to experience social decline while wringing our hands, pretending we do not know how to address the situation. That claim will be buttressed by the “diversity” and “pluralism” crowd that will claim society cannot “democratically” support, endorse, and subsidize genuine notions of marriage and family, even though they are based on natural law and not just religious doctrines.
And so, to borrow Robert Bork’s phrase, we will continue “slouching towards Gomorrah” while merely talking about the need for an effective marriage and family policy that rescues our society. We will, however, never have it as long as we treat marriage and family as the first “sanctuary” space free law: at first moral, and then reflected in the political.
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“there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”
Except marriage isn’t limited to the bedroom. Apart from whatever spiritual elements the participants recognize, it is both a private contract enforceable at law (generally against men and a reminder that the law is about equity, not justice) and a public franchise recognized by the state and other private entities that demands the public recognize an individual arrangement.
Five centuries ago, two men who were at generally at odds, Luther and Tudor-and for differing reasons subordinated marriage to the state-and largely succeeded.
There remains of course a strange denial of the idea “Marriage was an “estate” regulating one’s civil situation; it had nothing inherently to do with salvation”. If marriage is merely a civil estate, why do those denominations still have their ministers marry people?
Plenty of people march up a variety of aisles, vow until death do us part, and when things go bad, go to a court and get a civil divorce (in spite of the “what God has joined” injunction) which their church will happily recognize as a valid dissolution and then proceed to allow divorcees to “remarry”.
Of course The devil knew what he was doing when he appealed to those two men’s self-importance. Neither could imagine consequences of the alienation of marriage to the state as making divorce commonplace or that the state would dare to debase the institution to extend it two two individuals of the same sex.
Just about everything Dr John M. Grondelski exhorts us in this timely article, is true.
I’d only want to add that as far back as the 1940s, movies were making fornication, adultery and divorce seem like fun. With the aid of television and other media, that seed has become a jungle entangling almost everyone.
From the 1940s up to today, I can’t recall popes, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests, deacons, sisters, brothers or lay Catholic leaders persisting with firm teachings against fornication, prostitution, adultery, and divorce.
That itself is surely a serious offence? Saint Paul instructed Timothy to: “proclaim the message and, welcome or unwelcome, insist on it.”
Our Catholic teachers were never instructed to preach effete, popular, insipid latitude & laxity. Moses and Jesus preach Life or Death – so chose!
Until our clerics become obedient in always firmly instructing us in the 10 Commandments, as completed by Our LORD Jesus Christ, they must accept a large part of responsibility for the moral chaos John depicts.
As a qualified lay Catholic educationist and evangelist my own fun way to embody and memorize the love of God in giving us such an infallible prescription for human happiness, can be linked to my own digits.
HAND ONE
Thumb: “With all my heart, mind, body and soul I will worship the one God who is LOVE, revealed by Jesus Christ & The Holy Spirit.”
Index Finger: “I will have no other god nor any idol; not my family; not myself; not my political party, and certainly not money.
Middle Finger: “I will not use God’s name profanely; I will not swear oaths, for my ‘yes’ is yes and my ‘no’ is no.”
Ring Finger: “I will keep the Sabbath Day holy, in the way Jesus taught us.”
Little Finger: “I will honour my mum and dad.”
HAND TWO
Thumb: “I will love every person and not hurt or kill anyone, nor think evil of them, nor hate or take revenge.”
Index Finger: “I will maintain sexual purity and faithfulness in thought, word and deed.”
Middle Finger: “I will not steal; I will not rob others of their reputation.”
Ring Finger: “I will not tell lies, deceive, nor cheat.”
Little finger: “I will not covet for God in Christ is providing all I need”.
———————————————————
We could go further than dear Dr Grondelski in identifying the cause of the present devastation of marriage to more than a breach of:
“I will maintain sexual purity and faithfulness in thought, word and deed.”
In proper Christian Marriage, all of GOD’s Commandments work together to build a relational unity that steadily moves towards divine perfection, as about 25% of the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches (on pages 496 to 611).
When our heavyweight Catholic leaders insist on this, marriages will flourish, the Church will shine, and society will be transformed.
Ever in the love of King Jesus Christ; blessings from marty
Them Before Us – Katy Faust
Them Before movement
Trudeau mistook the bedroom sanctuary with the Christian institution of marriage. What consenting persons do in private has long had tolerance. For example, Britain intervened during the Puritan theocracy governments in Colonial New England when arrests and punishments were meted for irregular behaviors outside of the conjugal marriage act. King George issued the Royal Charter which imposed the precepts of the Common Law of England.
The Common Law tolerated freedom in mutual consenting acts. Whereas marriage was considered separate except for disordered acts such as sodomy. Nevertheless, the bedroom was considered a place of respected privacy. Adultery, however religiously unlawful, would not have the state require the adulterers to wear the scarlet letter as in Hawthorne’s famous novel.
Paul in his Letter to the Ephesians wrote, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church”. The mystery of marriage, a lasting unity between a man and a woman reflects God’s love for his Church, the Mystical Body in the world. This truth defines the sacrosanct union that God joins and no man may disjoin, including the Roman pontiff. Marriage has been demeaned as laid out by Grondelski and addressed by Robert Bork as a freedom of law sanctuary in which anyone can do whatever they wish with anyone. That’s our dilemma both juridically and morally. Marriage must be recognized as that sacrosanct union initiated by God as mutually binding and indissoluble. The conjugal act exclusive to the parties, an act of love ordered to God.
Dear Doctor Rice. I agree with much of what Dr. Grondelski concludes. With all due respect, I must take issue with what he and you said, relative to the demeaning of Protestantism.
“The bizarre part is that this all happened in countries that, at the time, were still “COASTING on Protestant gases.” Have you considered the effect of collateral damage that will disrupt the efforts of Catholic proselytization?
My family is composed of Evangelical Protestants. They pray to GOD every day. Because of ill-minded Catholics, they feel isolated. I would say that that position is truly un-Catholic.
Say a prayer that WE who do not “Slouch toward Gomohanna.”
Thank you.
Thanks, dear MorganD.
My humble comment referred to Catholics (particularly to our clerical leaders) who seem ignorant of basic ‘New Testament’ and ‘Catholic Catechism’ instructions; or, worse in some cases, deliberate cowardly choosing of the world’s amorality over their responsibility to faithfully insist on GOD’s instructions.
With the horid consequence Dr Grondelski describes of a ruination of holy matrimony in The Church, whose salt is becoming flavourless and only fit to be trampled under-foot by the rest of society.
Referring to your comment about protestants: As part of my scientific theology research, I gained considerable inside knowledge of a range of Protestant & Pentecostal churches, mega-churches & ministries. Without exception (in my experience) their pastors & ministers displayed a marked aversion to insisting on the pre-eminence of The 10 Commandments, as completed by our LORD Jesus Christ. Sex-before-marriage, adultery, divorce and perversions seemed to be normalised. What really mattered among most of them was that congregants turn up to pray, pay, and obey.
“Obedience to GOD” – what is that . . ?
Populist amorality regarding sex and marriage seems widespread.
Revelation 3:1b-2 “I know all about you: how you are reputed to be alive and yet are dead. Wake up; revive what little you have left: it is dying fast.”
“Come soon King Jesus!”
Love & blessings to all who stay true to Christ; from marty
Thanks, dear MorganD.
My humble comment referred to Catholics (particularly to our clerical leaders) who seem ignorant of basic ‘New Testament’ and ‘Catholic Catechism’ instructions; or, worse in some cases, manifest deliberate cowardly choosing of the world’s amorality over their responsibility to faithfully insist on GOD’s instructions.
With the consequence Dr Grondelski describes, of a ruination of holy matrimony in The Church, whose salt is becoming flavourless and only fit to be trampled underfoot by the rest of society.
Jesus calls us to be a City on a hilltop; not road-kill.
Referring to your comment about protestants: As part of my scientific theology research, I gained considerable inside knowledge of a range of Protestant & Pentecostal churches, mega-churches & ministries.
Without exception (in my experience) their pastors & ministers displayed a marked aversion to insisting on the pre-eminence of The 10 Commandments, as completed by our LORD Jesus Christ.
Sex-before-marriage, adultery, divorce & perversions seemed normalised.
For example, Lead Pastor Steve Dixon, of Hillsong Megachurch, dismissed such immoralities as ‘irrelevant’. “Obedience to GOD – what is that . . ?”
What really matters to most protestant vicars is that congegants turn up to pray, pay, and obey. In faith, I trust our Catholic clergy to aim higher!
Populist amorality regarding sex and marriage seems widespread.
Yet, I’ve never imagined protestants were solely to blame for this.
Revelation 3:1b-2
“I know all about you: how you are reputed to be alive and yet are dead. Wake up; revive what little you have left: it is dying fast.”
“Come soon dear LORD Jesus!”
Love & blessings from marty
As usual, you are confused. He took issue with tenets of Protestantism that made it a civilly dissolvable arrangement. Nobody would deny there are decent Protestants who pray daily.
But then again you have a dog in this fight-you.
I don’t deny that many Protestants take marriage seriously, but the stereotypical minister on television performing a marriage ceremony where he speaks of the “estate” of marriage is alluding to that secularization of marriage: marriage is part of the civil, not necessarily salvific order. My point about gases was that as long as you lived in a semi-Christian environment — which 16th century Catholics and Protestants both shared — your civil notion of marriage might still suspiciously look 95% Christian, but once the lawmaker defining marriage ceases to be God and becomes man (as it does in the Enlightenment period, e.g., when the Napoleonic Codes demanded civil marriages) then marriage is whatever the local Little Caesar defines it to be. And the human dangers of man defining marriage are not different if it’s one little Caesar or 50% + 1 little Caesars in a democratic parliament.
Dr. Grondelski, I always so enjoy your writing and your article comes home to me like truth. I am, however, having a devil of a time with one particular sentence in the 12th paragraph, to wit:
“If marriage, which the Protestant Reformers moved from state to church control, is now increasingly separated from God’s commands, then it will be up to men to decide what characteristics belong to marriage.”
Did you instead mean to write that the Protestant reformers moved marriage from church to state control? I mean, that is why presently we have civil judges dissolving marriages in court. The remainder of the piece describes the effects of marriage moving from church to state control. Attempting to understand if I am mistaken.
Sincerely and respectfully submitted.
You are correct. We’ve corrected the passage. Thank you!
Even prior to marriage being part of either the “sacramental order” or only the “temporal order” of the state, it was still part of the natural order.
With the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court fatwa demoting marriage to the level of arbitrary plumbing fixtures (Obergefell v. Hodges imposing the oxymoronic “gay marriage”) we have the seamless garment–connecting contraception to hookups, hookups to fetal infanticide/abortion, abortion to the abortion industry, the industry to the corporate homosexual agenda, the agenda to gender theory (and maybe polygamy and bestiality), the theory to even the mutilation of language (random personal pronouns), and language back to the physical mutilation of children.
In 1948 the defeated minority at the Anglican communion Lambeth Conference (1930) already told it like it is:
“It is, to say the least, suspicious that the age in which contraception has won its way is not one which has been conspicuously successful in managing its sexual life. Is it possible that, by claiming the right to manipulate his physical processes in this manner, man may, without knowing it, be stepping over the boundary between the world of Christian marriage and what one might call the world of Aphrodite, the world of sterile eroticism?” (Cited in Wright, “Reflections on the Third Anniversary of a Controverted Encyclical [Humanae Vitae],” St. Louis: Central Bureau Press, 1971).
Connect the dots…
Spot-on dear Peter D. Beaulieu.
Sins, inquities, abominations, defilements & sacrileges are all heart evils.
Proverbs 4:23 exhorts Catholics (and Anglicans, etc.):
“Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”
Saint Mark (chapter 7, verses 20-23) recounts GOD-in-Christ’s declaration:
“And Jesus said: ‘It is what comes out of a person that defiles, for it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, greedy avarice, malicious wickedness, lying deceit, indecent licentious sexual sins, the evil eye of envy, slander, arrogant pride, stupid behaviour. All these evils come from within and make a person polluted.'”
[today’s Aussie Gospel reading for Wednesday in 5th week of Ordinary Time]
When was the last time you heard a priest or bishop preach this . . ?
I’ve never heard a homily that explains these commonplace offences defile and pollute us spiritually . . .
Can anyone give salt back its savour . . ?
How come our Light is being hidden under a barrel . . ?
Come soon dear King Jesus!
Attempting to answer a question: “What does Jesus’ salt taste like?”
This video-clip of a brave musician singing The Truth in Harding Prison seems to provide the genuine savour of Christ’s salt . . .
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=Zach+Williams&&mid=4B024E3755313B81D4D14B024E3755313B81D4D1&FORM=VCGVRP
Robustly overcoming sin by His Gospel is the work Jesus appointed for every true Catholic.
This same robustness is essential if we are to defend Christian marriage.
Sexual morality is all about ethical CHOICE, as brilliantly contextualized in our Catholic Bibles’ book of ‘Sirac’; also called ‘Ecclesiaticus’ or ‘Church Book’. Verses 11 to 20 in chapter 15 would merit our attention.
“Do not say: ‘It was The LORD’s doing that I fell away’; for He does not do what He hates.
Do not say: ‘It was He who led me astray’; for He has no need of the sinful.
The LORD hates all abominations; such things are not loved by those who fear Him.
It was He who created humankind in the beginning and left them in the power of their own free choice.”
[incidentally, a cornerstone concept in ‘Ethical Encounter Theology’]
“If you chose you can keep the commandments, and to act faithfully is a matter of your own free choice.
He has placed before you fire and water; stretch out your hand for whatever you choose.
Before each person are life and death, and whichever one chooses will be given.
For great is the wisdom of The LORD; He is mighty in power and sees everything;
His eyes are on those who fear Him, and He knows every human action.
He has not commanded anyone to be wicked, and He has not given anyone permission to sin.”
Catholics believe proper clergy are Jesus-ordained deputy shepherds, chosen to lead His beloved sheep in the way of His commandments. If the deputies allow His sheep to wallow, uninstructed, in sin, they’ll surely be severely judged.
There’ll be no excuse, for ‘The Catechism of The Catholic Church’, given us by dear Saint John Paul II and dear Saint Benedict XVI, provides all our clergy with a readily available “sure norm for teaching the faith”.
Maybe this is something good Catholic lay people should insist that our beloved clergy take seriously.
Mr. Beaulieu above (7:55 p.m.) – Yes, I am more convinced every day that Lambeth 1930 has a lot to answer for.
Marriage and its preservation as instituted by Christ belongs to the Church. Although there are matters related to marriage that should be the jurisdiction of civil government, such as estate, finances, equal justice on family visiting rights following divorce.
As regards to what consenting adults do in the bedroom is a matter of privacy. If Catholic of course not all acts are morally licit. That becomes a matter of examination of conscience and confession of sins. Not government interference. That’s the one area that government should protect as mentioned regarding New England theocracies and the imposition of British law [English Common Law or the Common Law of England] to protect privacy.
An anomaly exists that Catholic dioceses are compelling married persons seeking a declaration of nullity be required to first file for civil divorce. Whereas, should not the Church seek to defend the marriage bond and possibly reconciliation? Leo XIV recently addressed the Roman Rota that reminded that members are indebted to seek reconciliation and the defense of marriage rather than debilitate it. Much of the problem on marriage resides with a doctrinally passive clergy as well as an uneducated laity.
When did the protection of privacy evolve into a political standard for determining moral behavior? That’s well covered by Grondelski.
With the loss of God acknowledged government justices and politicians became arbiters of determining good and evil usurping that role from the Church. That is, the Catholic Church, which in America was secondary to Protestantism. Roe v Wade enshrined privacy not simply as a right in limited areas, rather now as a right to determine life and death, all the dimensions of morality.
From this writer’s perspective, government exercised this assumed privilege as moral arbiter largely under the Obama administration, ironically reinforced by Dignitatis Humanae. Meant to protect religious freedom from the State it in turn presumed the right of the individual to choose and pick what suited rather than what is morally compelling.