Why is family structure weakening?: Catholic Social Teaching

The woman in the oncology ward

She has been married forty-seven years. She buried her second child at eleven months. She nursed her husband through two years of cancer treatment, sleeping on a cot three nights a week because the hospital chairs destroyed her back and she was not leaving. When someone at a dinner party described marriage as a partnership that works as long as both people are getting their needs met, she set down her fork and said, very quietly, That is the most selfish definition of love I have ever heard.

We begin with her because she is who we are. The woman who has done the thing. Who knows what the vow costs because she has paid it. Love is patient. That is not a greeting card. It is a job description.

The marriage rate did not fall because Americans discovered freedom. It fell because a culture saturated in individual choice lost the ability to understand that some goods exist because they are not chosen fresh every morning. The economic structuralists say the problem is money. Childcare costs are an obscenity. But Searcy has worse economics than Denver and better marriages. The variable that differs is whether anyone besides the two people believes the marriage matters.

Children raised by continuously married parents outperform every other structure on virtually every outcome. The effect holds after controlling for income.

Where we concede ground: Communities that sustained marriages also sustained silence about domestic violence and exclusion of gay couples.

What would change our mind: Inclusive, voluntary faith communities showing the same marriage decline as the broader population.

Read the full synthesis: Why is family structure weakening?