Monday, November 6, 2006

Ballot initiatives

The Milwaukee magazine article on "Catholics in Crisis" cited this statistic (p. 54).
The number of couples married in the Milwaukee archdiocese has fallen by an astonishing 42 percent since 1989. The could lose the church two generations: the couples and their future children.

The Priests Alliance statement on tomorrow's vote on the defense of marriage amendment takes a "root causes" approach, claiming that the problems of marriage as an institution come from poverty, the loss of stability and fringe benefits in employment, and the commercialization of sex.

These are hardly new developments since 1989, so it's hard to see how they explain this drop since then among Catholics. They say
Indeed, our pastoral experience tells us that the prospect of gay unions is not a chief cause of marital instability and family dissolution.

That does not address whether the prospect of gay unions and the steep decline in marriage proceed from a common change in attitudes toward marriage and sexuality, attitudes contrary to Church teaching.

And if, as they claim, marriage can be affected by societal changes as tangential as a change from defined benefit to defined contribution pensions, then that hardly justifies a lack of concern with the long-term effects of as basic a change as same-sex marriage or its equivalent. As Patrick McIlheran said
You must answer "yes," then, merely to keep from being whisked to where no human society has been.

1 comment:

  1. It's also possible that Church PREACHING (not teaching) could be more pointed on the issue of cohabitation...

    But then someone would have to actually take some heat from disaffected fornicators.

    ReplyDelete