Marriage, Family, And Society

A series of questions for the patient reader; by all means, try to mentally answer them before proceeding: 

Is marriage a private institution?  If yes, why?

Is marriage a social institution?  If yes, why?

Does marriage impact the common good?  If yes, why and how?

Thankfully, the U.S. Bishops’ ongoing project, Marriage: Unique for a Reason (www.marriageuniqueforareason.org/), addresses these questions.  Marriage: Unique for a Reasonexplores several themes (sexual difference, children, religious freedom, and the common good of society) to educate Catholics about “why marriage is unique and should be promoted and protected as the union of one man and one woman.”  Drawing on the Bishops’ project, this article explores the common good, which the Catechism of the Catholic Church describes as the “sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily” (1906).  Subsequent articles will investigate other themes.  

Let’s return to the above questions.

Is marriage a private relationship?  No.  “Private” implies that marriage plays no vital role in society – a mistaken assumption, as we shall see below.  It also suggests that marriage is little more than a contract between spouses.  In fact, the federal and state governments long ago decided that they had a compelling interest in marriage for several reasons – including the fact that male-female sexual relationships create new persons and citizens who need supervision and care. 

Also, government recognition requires many additional third parties to treat spouses as uniquely bonded.  Princeton University Professor of Jurisprudence Robert P. George and his colleagues explain in their book, “What Is Marriage” – “For private institutions can bind only their own; private contracts bind only those who are party to them.  A major function of marriage law is to bind all third parties (schools, adoption agencies, summer camps, hospitals, friends, relatives, strangers) presumptively to treat man as father of his wife’s children, husbands and wives as entitled to certain privileges and sexually off-limits, and so on.  This only the state can do with any consistency.”

            For its part, Marriage: Unique for a Reason distinguishes between privateand personal.  Marriage is not the former but the latter, as the bond unites a man and woman permanently and exclusively to one another; is sealed by God himself; and is by its nature ordered toward the procreation and education of children.

Marriage is irrevocably social.  The unique relationship’s social dimension is particularly transparent when one considers that marriage – the only institution that unites children to their mothers and fathers – is the foundation of the family, which the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church describes as the “key cell” and “very source” of society.  The permanent and exclusive bond between spouses provides a context wherein procreation can occur in a socially responsible way.  And indeed, a host of social scientific studies suggest that a family headed by two biological parents in a low-conflict marriage is the family structure that most helps American children – educationally, emotionally, and behaviorally.

In respect to the common good, marriage and family are critical as they afford the context wherein children receive their “first formative ideas about truth and goodness,” as the Compendium poignantly points out.  In the family, people grasp the love and faithfulness of the Lord, and the need to respond to these.  Here, members first experience what it means to love and be loved, “and thus what it actually means to be a person.”  Here, people learn to lovingly welcome new human life; and about responsibilities to each other and to the sick, impoverished, lonely, orphans, handicapped and otherwise vulnerable.  The family has a responsibility to try to inculcate respect, justice, the right use of freedom, heartfelt acceptance, dialogue, solidarity, the ethical order of human work, and how to become participants in social and political life.  The health of society and the state, of course, also depends on citizens acquiring and practicing many of these traits.

In sum, marriage is personal but not private.  It is the foundation of the family, which is the “school of social virtue, which all societies need.”  Guided by the logic of sharing and solidarity among generations, the family exposes “the failings and contradictions of a society that is for the most part, even if not exclusively, based on efficiency and functionality.”  “By practicing loving interdependence,” Marriage: Unique for a Reason observes, “husband and wife teach society to reject individualism and seek the common good for all.”