Clifford Longley is correct in pointing out the shocking poverty divide between the married and the unmarried (The Tablet, 30 October).
Michelle Singletary of the Washington Post trumpets the results of a new study demonstrating that the retreat from marriage has a lot to do with the state of our economy. Summarising the findings, she writes “stable, two-parent families decrease the chance of people ending up impoverished. The gap between rich and poor will only continue to grow if the low-income continue to shy away from marriage.” And among her telling conclusions is that “we spend a lot of time telling young adults to get a good education so that they can get a good job. The other part of that economic equation is trumpeting the benefits of a stable marriage.”
Likewise, research by the University of California suggests that the reason for the retreat from marriage among the poor is not that they don’t value wedlock but rather that they don’t quite grasp how marriage pays dividends economically, even though survey participants agreed that a happy marriage is “one of the most important things in life” and that parents “ought to be married”.
One would have thought that trumpeting the obvious economic social and emotional benefits of marriage would be high on the agenda of Catholic welfare agencies with CSAN membership, including all organisations at the vanguard of building a culture of marriage on behalf of the hierarchy.
As we seek to prepare for the theme of the vocation and mission of the family for next October’s Synod, it will take more than just a few joined up ideas on spiritual/pastoral care to recreate a marriage-building culture in the Catholic community and beyond; it needs a complete paradigm shift away from the all-too-often silo mentality in our institutional structures that allows for matrimony to be either way down on the list of priorities instead of at the top, or even worse, not on the agenda at all, driven by what journalist John Allen cleverly terms “lifestyle ecumenism”.
Edmund P Adamus, Director for Marriage and Family Life, Diocese of Westminster
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