On 17 November, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops approved and promulgated a text called Marriage: Love and Life in the Divine Plan. By design, there is nothing new in it: it restates the Catholic doctrine of marriage in a pastoral key, and is intended to help those who are married, or who have the task of advising and guiding those who are married or are planning marriage, to understand better what they are undertaking. There are some beautiful things in it: sometimes (not often enough, but sometimes), the language soars, as when we read that marriage is “to be a school for nurturing gratitude” — gratitude, that is for the gifts of God, for the goods and delights of marriage, and for the fact of one’s spouse. Yes; a difficult lesson and a hard school, but, nevertheless, yes.
For the most part, though, the text restates with care and accuracy, for an American audience, the Catholic understanding of marriage, in language more appropriate to the lecture hall or the presbytery than to the bedroom or the kitchen table. The Song of Songs, surely the best scriptural work on one of the fundamental reasons why people get married — that they are intoxicated with one another and want nothing more than the deepest intimacy with one another they can imagine or hope for — is quoted in only one paragraph. Wouldn’t a passionate meditation on the Song have been a good place to begin?
One thing the text does make clear is the deep difference between a Catholic understanding of marriage and that enshrined in American civil law. That difference is now so deep as to be almost unbridgeable. For Catholics (or at least for Catholic doctrine), marriage is sacrament and gift, participatory in Christ’s intimacy with the Church, and a proper foreshadowing of the intimacy with which we shall one day know and be known by the Lord. For American civil law, marriage is a form of contract, and one with the interesting property of being dissolvable at the will of either signatory. (Most contracts aren’t like that: try telling your bank that you’d like unilaterally to dissolve your mortgage contract.) Given such a difference, to use the same word, ‘marriage’, for both is simple equivocation. Such usage sows confusion on all sides. Imagine how confusing things would get if we thought that in advocating changes in the rules of what the Americans call ‘football’ we would have an effect on the rules of what the English call ‘football.’ The current debate about civil marriage law and ecclesial practice in the US is just about that confusing. It’s time for all sides to acknowledge this, and thereby to dissolve most of the apparent disagreements about who should get married and under what circumstances.
