Witness to Love is attempting to answer basic questions about U.S. marriage culture, she said, namely: “Why are people not getting married? Staying married? Going to church with their families?”
“It’s because they’re not seeing holy, healthy, happy marriages being lived out,” she said. “We need to talk more about marriage as a sacrament. What’s difficult about marriage? What’s amazing about marriage? You really need to give them the full picture.”
Wilcox said part of the decline could be attributed to the diminishing prospects of marriage-age men, many of whom are increasingly foregoing higher education and who are seeing fewer job opportunities and lower incomes.
Marsha Garrison, a professor at Brooklyn Law School who has been studying marriage and family structures for decades, offered a similar analysis. “In the United States, marriage and child-bearing behavior are strongly correlated with education,” she told CNA, noting that “most young adults see stable employment as a precondition to marriage.”
Garrison suggested lawmakers could play a role in reversing these declines. “Encouraging education and policies which create stable, well-paying blue collar jobs … could have some impact on marriage rates,” she said, though she argued that “we are unlikely to ever return to the old world in which marriage is near-universal.”
Wilcox also argued that the government could play a role in promoting marriage among working-class couples, including with child-care subsidies that could help ease the economic costs of child-rearing.
Wilcox said the Church could also make a more proactive effort in promoting marriage among faithful Catholics.
“If you’d like to live a life that is meaningful, and reasonably happy, getting married, investing in your spouse and any kids that you have, it’s incredibly important,” he said. “That’s a message that the Church could be much more forceful in bringing to people sitting in the pews.”
Verret also argued that the Church is not doing enough to inculcate a marriage culture among Catholics. The “secular culture,” she said, is broadcasting messages about marriage loudly and often, while the Church is delivering its own message “in such a quiet voice, or is making it so hard to find.”
“If you’re not super-volunteered, going to extra formation, you’re just not going to get it,” she said. Above all, she argued, the Church needs to be discussing marriage at every step of life in order to make it a normalized part of a Catholic upbringing.
“We’re not going to have healthy families if we wait six months before the wedding date to talk about marriages,” she said.am
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Daniel Payne is a senior editor at Catholic News Agency. He previously worked at the College Fix and Just the News. He lives in Virginia with his family.