When it comes to scandals within the Church, it isn’t enough for Catholics to demand that the bishops do something or to posture as if only a miraculous prophet will do.

These findings are closely related to debates among those of us who were writing about same-sex marriage back in the early ’00s:

Calling cohabitation a socially “normative behavior,” the article noted an 82 percent increase between 1987 and 2010 of women who have cohabited at some point, as reported in a study by demographer Wendy Manning.

Cohabiting couples are also increasingly more likely to have children. There has been a 15 percent increase in cohabiting parents from 1997 to 2017, a Pew Research study found.

“Due primarily to the rising number of cohabiting parents, the share of unmarried parents who are fathers has more than doubled over the past 50 years,” Pew reported.

“Cohabitation has greatly increased in large measure because, while people are delaying marriage to ever greater ages, they are not delaying sex, living together, or childbearing,” the IFS said, noting that “almost all of the increase in non-marital births in the US since 1980 has taken place in the context of cohabiting unions.”

Nobody claimed that broadening the definition of marriage to include intimate couples that, by their nature, could not create children would produce these trends. Rather, these trends were underway, and codifying same-sex marriage in the law locks them in.

The connection is obvious. With the introduction of same-sex marriage, people simply can’t claim that the creation of children is part of marriage (and vice versa), even thematically. Marriage becomes entirely about the feelings of adults about each other, and any children they create are incidental. That approach is corrosive for both the relationships of the parents and the relationships of the parents with their children, who are no longer conceived as the embodiment of the parents’ joining.

The parents’ relationship, even if a marriage, is now purely contractual and separate from its fruits. This won’t work out well in the long run.

Need to take a break from politics?  Turn to the culture war for a moment.  Thomas Curry raises an interesting question in a recent letter to the Providence Journal.  He and his wife were “subscribers” to the recently closed 2nd Story Theatre in Warren for two decades, but then:

Over the last several years, we noticed a trend in the selection of plays that we found unsettling. We had decided not to renew our subscription for the coming season, which was a disappointing end to a long-term relationship.

Gratuitous profanity and genres that seemed to target a segment of theatergoers outside of our interests seemed to be on the increase. In some performances a few years ago, there was full frontal male nudity. Since then, I have been reluctant to invite a friend or my grandchildren to a performance, fearing embarrassment because of over-the-top flamboyance, profanity or even nudity. We also noticed that there were more and more empty seats.

Some of my most fond memories are of small-venue theater performances of classics and semi-classics — from Shakespeare to Wait Until Dark to Death Takes a Holiday to The Price, and I’ve hoped that a more stable household budget and a loosening schedule (someday) would allow for more such experiences.

I wonder, though, whether those owners, directors, and actors who gravitate toward (or get stuck in) these small venues have a greater inclination to be transgressive.  Strong social standards once put some restraints on that inclination; even beyond the question of direct marketability, one just didn’t push the envelope too far.  For my money, that tension made for better art.  Subtle transgression is necessarily smarter and more profound, if only because of the ambiguity it requires.

But standards have long been deteriorating and have been wiped away entirely in recent years.  Some precincts have a strong standard to always attack the old standards, and we’re reaching the point that clever, subtle transgression can only be accomplished in support of traditional values.

This context creates some intriguing opportunities.  Perhaps a small-venue theater that explicitly stuck to the vast library of classics and semi-classics could fill their seats with the likes of Mr. Curry and me.  And perhaps it could periodically sneak in a play with some subversive cultural conservatism.

A Catholic News Agency article by Ed Condon conveys various responses to this comment from Cardinal Kevin Farrell, head of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life, explaining why “priests are not the best people to train others for marriage”:

“They have no credibility; they have never lived the experience; they may know moral theology, dogmatic theology in theory, but to go from there to putting it into practice every day….they don’t have the experience,” the cardinal added.

I can’t help but feel like the thing that Cardinal Farrell appears to miss is also missing in important ways throughout our culture.  In the life of a church, a priest should have a unique view of people throughout their lives, having helped to train children in the faith, helped couples through their marital challenges, and been with them in times of loss at the ends of their lives.  And don’t forget their experience taking believers’ confessions and then being able to observe them in their lives.

Sure, the extent to which this idealized image applies may be fading.  Fewer priests overseeing smaller parishes with more managerial responsibilities in a less-personally-connected world are not in the same position in which their predecessors may have been, and we shouldn’t shy from acknowledging that in order to save impressions.  My disagreement with the cardinal’s comment, however, is that he seems to be suggesting not that this is a problem to reverse, but that it’s a permanent change to which to adjust.

And so we drift further into isolation, turning to one-off quacks and clinicians who have financial incentive to tell us what we want to hear and professional incentives to advance a secular, materialist worldview, while we increasingly behave as if people with real experience have nothing to tell us and politicians have some keen insight into what our behavior ought to be.

I’d promote religious leaders as particularly well suited to play this role, but the heart of the loss is a figure who is expected to have the good of a community in central focus based on transcendent principles.