“Marriage ……..is a union possessing all the traits of a good friendship: concern for the good of the other, reciprocity, intimacy, warmth, stability and the resemblance born of a shared life”. (Pope Francis)
Beautifully said. But the Pope is still not powerful or influential enough to overturn artificial birth control (supported de facto by most Catholics), the rejection of IVF and gay marriage, and the total Church opposition to all abortion. I think our Epicurean hearts should go out to him, balancing as he is on a seemingly impossible tightrope. Well, that’s what irrational religions seem to make you do.
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Like the Pope I’m very pro-marriage. It’s a human institution that has given billions of people throughout history immense security (both economic and family), joy and happiness. Not only have the couples themselves largely been happily married, so have the children brought up in them. There is plenty of evidence to show that children born into married couples are happier and do better at school than those who don’t. There may be class and race factors in this: wealthier people are more likely to be married than poorer people, and in the US, whites are more likely to be married than blacks. But I would argue that to an extent, marriage is the cause of prosperity, not the result.
There is one problem with modern day marriage. People are increasingly marring within their own class. This is reducing social mobility, because marriage is longer a viable option for poor people to escape poverty. To an extent this is natural: the chances are were I to get married, it would probably with someone of the same class simply because I know more people within my own class. But it is part of an overall trend towards class self-segregation, rather than integration.