VOWS, NOT LAWS
O'Rourke, David K.
Vows, not laws: the baptized have a right to marriage James Davidson's article on Catholic marriage statistics ["Outside the Church," September 10.1 is (another) good wake-up call concerning the...
...Robert Beliah answered that question in those pages years ago...
...At the wry least that demand is not smart...
...Despite having no parish connection, I am often asked to help couples marry, basically because they know I will help them and they say that no one else will...
...Our program-oriented churches seem determined to convince themselves that there is a bureaucratic alternative to the human art of welcoming people...
...In its place is the more individualist view of the church as an assembly of believers, where membership comes through individual commitment...
...Commonweal I O~ December 17,1999...
...And, in this essentially congregational model, turning the religiously mobile away makes perfect sense...
...Wanting to see people come to terms with the demands of religious commitments is a good long-term goal...
...Many clergy, despite what 1 believe are their canonical obligations, will marry only those people who fit their own, personal definitions of church membership...
...Often the first act in the process for plugging in again is trying to find a place to be married...
...His views are on target, but the problem is, I believe, larger than he recognizes...
...They don't register to vote, they don't belong to organizations, don't have medical insurance, don't pin parishes...
...Requiring that as a prerequisite to marrying them is, in effect, to close the doors in their face because it is asking them to make an institutional commitment at the time in their lives when, we are...
...And if Catholic theology says that baptism makes them belong just as much as the pope, then too bad for theology...
...Those of us who believe that one toe in the door beats two feet outside are a disappearing group...
...told, they are least prepared to do so...
...And mobile young Catholics are parish outsiders...
...If that focus on their own relationship is followed with pastoral good sense, then as the other issues come up in the normal course of life—birth, parenting, education, and death—the chances are that the couple will be visible members of the church, since people have a way of being where they are wanted, needed, and helped...
...D.\vu> K. O'Rourkl David K O'Rourke, O.I'., a former pastor, serves on the marriage tribunal in the Dioa'sr of Oakland, California...
...If they understand the vows, and are prepared to love and honor each other all the days of their lives, as the vows ask of them, then they are prepared in the way the church requires...
...American religious individualism has overwhelmed the traditionally Catholic view of the- church as the Body of Christ, where the church is analogically prior to the individual and membership comes Siuramen-tally through baptism...
...Where did this new view come from...
...They don't get help because, in this new view, they don't have a claim on help...
...I think it's more accurate to say that the combination of their personal and religious mobility and a narrower sense of church membership has turned them into outsiders...
...They don't belong...
...And that, 1 fear, is the real issue underlying demands for institutional commitment...
...People on the outside know when they are welcome and when they're not...
...Bishop John Cummins of Oakland once commented that one of our priests was a wonderful pastor because he was such a good host...
...Young Americans typically disconnect from our social institutions in their later teens and become personally and socially mobile...
...And it is a tough act...
...Personal mobility is a fact of American life...
...A better, and much more Catholic, alternative is to bring them in and focus any discussion on the words of the...
...Vows, not laws: the baptized have a right to marriage James Davidson's article on Catholic marriage statistics ["Outside the Church," September 10.1 is (another) good wake-up call concerning the size of the Catholic crowd no longer beating its way to our parish doors...
...Catholics don't marry in the church because many parishes have made it so hard for typical American Catholics to do so...
...And Americans don't reconnect usually until they start raising their own children...
...marriage vows themselves, not on acts of clerical fealty...
Vol. 126 • December 1999 • No. 22
