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There was a little bit of Facebook hullabaloo over this Tuesday’s march against gay marriage in D.C., which is being promoted by Catholic bishops.  As usual, the bishops going out of their way to prevent non-Catholics from getting things like hospital visitation rights is a good indicator of the general fact that if you want to be a good person you must not listen to bishops.  The good news is that Catholics have been aware of this for a long time.

It did make me think about the decline of marriage, however, which is fairly undeniable: in the U.S., about fifty percent of adults are married now, down from seventy percent five decades ago (the statistics are almost precisely the same in Europe).

But I suspect that a great deal (though not all) of the statistical variance is just due to the nature of the data-collection, not the actual realities on the ground.  “Marriage rates” really measure “wedding rates,” i.e. the number of people who have weddings.  People who live with all the actualities of marriage but have not had the wedding do not figure in the statistics.  I suspect that if you add the marriages and the cohabitations you would come up with something more stable (though I don’t think it would add up all the way, I think it would be close).

Having had a wedding that did not lead to an actual marital state, and having seen marriages that did not have weddings, I wonder about what the future of these things will be.  I know that many religiously observant people aim principally at weddings: one person told me that she would sooner get married without cohabitation than cohabit without a wedding.

While there is not always such a conflict, if there were a choice that had to be made I myself would take reality before the seeming any day, and this issue made me think of Augustine and his discussion of pagan religion in City of God.  Everyone knows the new religious structures set in motion by Jesus eventually added pre-Christian rituals such as weddings to their practices, though the apostles probably never performed weddings and none of the early Christian sources mention marriage among the sacraments.  Legally the Romans defined marriage not by the performance of a wedding but by two things, cohabitation and the “affectio maritalis,” which is difficult to define but is more or less the intention to be man and wife, though it needed some legal signposting to be enforceable.  I find this online:

The affectio maritalis was actually the intention that the partners had to be husband and wife, which was expressed through their social and intimate behavior.

The affectio maritalis had three [legal] elements:  Nomen, or name, which was the wife taking her husband’s gens name; Tractatus, or treatment, which involved the husband formally treating his wife as a wife, in public and in intimacy, and viceversa; and finally, Fama or reputatio, which involves society’s knowledge of them being husband and wife.

There was no ritual involved – it was very matter-of-fact.  This was the legal definition of marriage in Jesus’s day.  Nowadays the conservative Christians would think of this as the Whore of Babylon come to town.

Let us go to Augustine.  He talks about how much trouble the Roman religion had when it encountered foreign nations.  The Roman religion was based on the idea that the worship of certain deities helped secure certain goods.  But there were nations like the Hebrews who managed to live with the goods, but without the worship:

Nor did their women invoke Lucina when their offspring was being incredibly multiplied; and that nation having increased incredibly, He Himself delivered, He Himself saved them from the hands of the Egyptians, who persecuted them, and wished to kill all their infants. Without the goddess Rumina they sucked; without Cunina they were cradled, without Educa and Potina they took food and drink; without all those puerile gods they were educated; without the nuptial gods they were married; without the worship of Priapus they had conjugal intercourse; without invocation of Neptune the divided sea opened up a way for them to pass over, and overwhelmed with its returning waves their enemies who pursued them. Neither did they consecrate any goddess Mannia when they received manna from heaven; nor, when the smitten rock poured forth water to them when they thirsted, did they worship Nymphs and Lymphs. Without the mad rites of Mars and Bellona they carried on war; and while, indeed, they did not conquer without victory, yet they did not hold it to be a goddess, but the gift of their God. Without Segetia they had harvests; without Bubona, oxen; honey without Mellona; apples without Pomona: and, in a word, everything for which the Romans thought they must supplicate so great a crowd of false gods, they received much more happily from the one true God.

This to me is the real reason why marriage – or rather, weddings – need such defense, which is that while they are nice – and I will say, my wedding was one of the best experiences of my life – they are not proving terribly necessary.  Weddings need defense only because they do not speak for themselves.  Augustine’s reasoning against paganism can be used against much sacramental theology, which makes sense, of course, because much of the Church’s sacramental life has been a slow-motion borrowing from paganism over the course of centuries.  My parents never had a wedding – they just lived together and raised three kids and lived publicly as husband and wife.  It’s hard to see what would need to be added to that to make it a marriage.