The number of Catholic marriages celebrated yearly in the United States plummeted more than 50 percent during the last four decades, paralleling a similar drop in the nation’s overall marriage rate. The dropoffs occurred at the same time that population – both general population and Catholic population – continued to rise.
Later marriage, growing acceptance of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births, and a diminished sense of religious identity are all possible factors in the decline in Catholic marriages that U.S. dioceses report.
U.S. Catholic dioceses reported 426,000 Catholic marriages in 1970 but only about 212,000 in 2006, a decline of 214,000. In these years, there also was a 50 percent drop in the number of marriages annually per 1,000 adult American women.
As Catholic marriage in the United States headed down, Catholic population headed up. While the number of marriages yearly was falling by more than 200,000 in four decades, the number of Catholics increased more than 19 million, from 48 million in 1970 to 67 million last year.
In Ireland, couples are delaying marriage until later into their 30s and more are having civil marriages, according to the latest figures released by the Central Statistics Office yesterday.
In 2005, Mr and Mrs Average were 33 years old and 31 years old respectively when they took their marriage vows, compared to 1996, when their ages were 30 and 28.
Slightly more than 64 percent of men and almost half of women getting married were over 30 in 2005. The oldest brides and grooms in Ireland were living in the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown area. There, the average groom was almost 35 years old and the average bride was 32 1/2.
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I wonder what impact Ireland's economic resurgence of the 1990's (known as the "Celtic Tiger") has had on the trend to delay marriage. In a relatively short period of time, Ireland went from one of Europe's poorest countries to one of its richest. (Incidentally, Catholicism is waning in Ireland and much of Europe, which leads to speculation that a German Pope was largely selected to address this issue.) In the U.S., the rising economic independence of women from men has been a factor for women (whose grandmothers were encouraged to wed in order to gain financial support) not to feel pressured to rush into marriage. In one way, economic opportunity for women can be viewed as having had a positive impact on marriage in that women may now be less likely to make the decision to marry unemcumbered by personal financial concerns. However, for couples, do lifestyle expectations that come with financial success (e.g. bigger house, bigger car) and a rapidly growing economy work to block a couple from answering a call from God earlier? The focus on "having it all" financially may cause couples to live together longer in order to save for the right house or just get their finances where they want them. I suspect there are several cultural forces at play that are affecting Irish couples' decision to marry later, but it's interesting to note that the trends of economic prosperity and delayed marriage are overlapping.
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