The Catholic Spirit: Faithful citizens care about marriage because they care about poverty

I hear it a lot, from non-Catholics and even Catholics: “Why doesn’t the Church spend more time fighting poverty and less time telling people what kind of family is best? Quit spending time on an outdated ideal of marriage and feed the hungry, clothe the naked and take care of the sick.”

One answer is to point out that the Church, speaking of her simply as an institutional structure, already does a great deal of work with the hungry, naked and sick. It’s rightly said that the Catholic Church is the largest social service agency in the world.

A deeper answer is that marriage and poverty are, indeed, tightly tied together in the real world. The Church isn’t interested in stable marriages simply out of nostalgia for an era of “Leave it to Beaver” perfection. In 2,000 years, the Church has had a lot of experience with family structures of all kinds. Both revelation and reasoning, derived from that experience, lead to the conclusion that marriage is a key ingredient in warding off not only poverty but a whole host of other social ills.

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Economic benefits

Sawhill observes that research she has done with colleague Adam Thomas indicates that if single mothers were matched with demographically similar unmarried men, the child poverty rate would fall by about 20 percent. Married mothers have significant economic benefits over single mothers that lead to significant economic advantages for their children. While government certainly has a role to play in helping single and divorced parents financially, Sawhill concludes that “no government program is likely to reduce child poverty as much as bringing back marriage as the preferable way of raising children.” (Sawhill favors subsidies or tax credits for child care as well as the earned income tax credit.)

But human flourishing is not just about economic benefits. Married biological parents don’t just produce fewer poor children; they produce children less likely to: drop out of school, get pregnant before marriage, attempt suicide, commit crimes, and have emotional or medical problems. Married two-parent biological families are not just about extra “economic input.” They are about flourishing.

In the name of Christ, the Church understands the messiness of life and accepts all people no matter what the state of their lives are. We are not a society of the perfect. But as a matter of duty, the Church keeps speaking in the public arena about marriage, divorce and cohabitation precisely because these issues mean so much in the fight to feed, clothe and heal a hurting world.

David Paul Deavel is associate editor of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture and adjunct professor in the department of Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas. He is a frequent contributor to the Minnesota Catholic Conference blog Unique for a Reason: why marriage matters (marriagematters.mncc.org). 

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