by Joan Mitchell, CSJ
Marriage is a life work, a promise and a process couples live out over time. With the gift of life comes the capacity to develop into full human beings. With marriage, relationships ideally grow deep and sustaining as partners share daily and intimate life together. In moments of ecstasy and anguish, agreeing and arguing, couples weave ties that bind.
Today more partners than not expect equality and mutuality in marriage. They share the chores that keep a household going and the responsibilities for raising children. In Amoris Laetitia, Love in the Family, Pope Francis affirms the growing equality and reciprocity between men and women in their marriages today (#54). Some couples favor traditional homemaker and breadwinner roles.
Today young people with college educations and high-earning jobs are marrying later, men at 29 and women at 27. Travel offers too many adventures to settle down, they need more education, or they want to pay down loans. These young people who try out their dreams and test relationships stay married more successfully, divorcing less, than those in the past who married younger. Cohabitation is common, often as a step to marriage. Where the economy lags and young men lack job opportunity, they can’t even think about marriage.
What about divorce? This is the question in Sunday’s gospel and a question that the Synod on the Family engaged. Marriages fall apart. A spouse needs to escape violence or subjugation. Spouses aren’t mature enough to make commitments. In Amoris Laetitia (2016), Pope Francis summarizes the Synod’s thinking and speaks to the complexities married couples face today.
Where legalists draw sharp unyielding lines, Pope Francis speaks pastorally about making room for grace and respecting people’s consciences. The Church that is a field hospital doesn’t cut off divorced and remarried couples from communion and the companionship of parish life.
- What do you value about marriage? What’s hardest?