With the gay marriage (and, as per Kinsley, the overall marriage) debate raging,

it’s worth pausing over the new statistics about the state of marriage in the

Catholic church today. The recently released Official Catholic Directory notes

that there were almost 15,000 fewer marriages in the church in 2002 than in 2001 (which, in turn, saw about 12,500 fewer than in 2000). Now, obviously,

demographics plays a part, and some Catholic couples are marrying in civil

ceremonies. Yet I can’t

shake the feeling that a lot of this decrease has something to do with the

increase in cohabitation, especially among the young.

As Bill Bennett noted in his bookThe Broken Hearth , “The . . . task

is to publicly reaffirm the centrality of the family and reestablish cultural

strictures against its dissolution. In America, one institution can do this

more effectively than any other: Christian churches, to which more than sixty

percent of the American people belong.” Unfortunately, as Bennett also notes,

too many churches are silent about these issues.