Family Ethics

Practices for Christians

Julie Hanlon Rubio

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781589016392
• eBook ISBN: 9781589016675
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

How can ordinary Christians find moral guidance for the mundane dilemmas they confront in their daily lives? To answer this question, Julie Hanlon Rubio brings together a rich Catholic theology of marriage and a strong commitment to social justice to focus on the place where the ethics of ordinary life are played out: the family.

Sex, money, eating, spirituality, and service. According to Rubio, all are areas for practical application of an ethics of the family. In each area, intentional practices can function as acts of resistance to a cultural and middle-class conformity that promotes materialism over relationships. These practices forge deep connections within the family and help families live out their calling to be in solidarity with others and participate in social change from below. It is through these everyday moral choices that most Christians can live out their faith—and contribute to progress in the world.

Part I / Resources from the Catholic Tradition

CHAPTER ONE

A Catholic Theological Understanding of Marriage

This book aims to develop a Christian ethic of the family that is both personally and socially conscious. It offers ethical analysis of moral issues that arise in the lives of ordinary Christians, most of whom live in some sort of family, and suggests ways that some everyday choices may promote or impede social goods such as justice, participation, and equality. Some who are sympathetic to the social justice part of this book may worry that the ordinary moral dilemmas of families are marginal to social ethics. Catholic theology of the family in particular, it is thought, has been concerned largely with the relationship between husband and wife and their procreative project to the neglect of larger, more important social issues. Thus, it is argued, those who would call Christians to discipleship in the world would do well to move beyond the family, that is, beyond the ordinary concerns of life in the home.

However, I argue in this chapter that family life is often the place where Christians experience the unity of the personal and the social. The household is a unique locus of personal choices of social significance. This is usually where the ethics of ordinary life is played out, where daily decisions that impact the shape and progress of the world are made. Catholic theology allows us to see this reality more clearly, for it is marked by an understanding of the family as both personal and social. This chapter examines the unity of personal and social dimensions of the family in the marriage liturgy, scripture, and sacramental theology and contrasts this understanding with the more private, romantic, individualistic view of American middle-class culture. The richly personal and social Christian vision of the family will provide a crucial part of the theological foundation for the ethical analysis of practices that is taken up in the second half of the book.

Cultural Understandings of Marriage

In American popular culture, portrayals of marriage are rare. In fact, anyone who listens carefully to prominent cultural narratives about marriage might be forgiven for asking, “Why get married?”1 While it is true that a multimillion dollar wedding industry continues to thrive, that many girls grow up dreaming about their perfect day, and that most Americans still want to live happily ever after, very few stories about “the ever after” are actually told.2

The most popular stories fall into a few predictable genres. There are the fairy tales such as Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, or Pretty Woman that narrate the meeting of two lovers and point to the happily ever after but almost never portray it. There are also numerous boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-and-girl-make-up-and-plan-to or actually-do-get-married movies (Love Story, When Harry Met Sally, Titanic, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Wedding Crashers). These are stories about love’s beginnings—but then what? Note that in several examples someone dies before the couple can actually experience much, if anything, of marriage. The great love stories once people are married are about their affairs (Casablanca, The English Patient, An Affair to Remember). During this last set of movies, despite the nearly universal condemnation of infidelity, the audience roots for the lovers, because their passionate relationship always seems more real than the passionless marriages the lovers leave behind. True, there are comedies about family life such as Parenthood, The Parent Trap, or Cheaper by the Dozen, but these films exaggerate so much in an effort to get laughs and heartwarming endings that they fail to get to the reality of familial relationships. Occasionally the audience is allowed a glimpse of married couples when they are older, as in When Harry Met Sally, but they rarely get to see what happened between the romance of youth and the sweet embrace of old age. It seems that it is enough to know that at the beginning and the end the couple are soul mates: They are made for each other.3

These narratives remain compelling—even to those who easily dismiss them as unrealistic—because they seem to present an answer to the widespread problem of loneliness in a fragmented world. The unity of family, friends, and neighborhood that prevailed throughout much of the early twentieth century has given way to compartmentalization. The lives of most are split into many different segments, making the sustaining of personal bonds difficult. Catholic life in particular used to be centered around the neighborhood parish, where children went to school, families walked to Mass, and relatives and friends met for worship, prayer, and socializing.4 Ties between parishioners were multilayered, overlapping, and regularly reinforced through frequent interaction. However, most families today are involved in multiple communities connected to one or two jobs, a neighborhood (or more when parents are separated or divorced), multiple children’s schools, a parish, interest groups formed around sports or other activities, friendships, and extended family networks that increasingly span the nation or even the world. For Catholics, like most Americans, this leads to a sense of fragmentation or, in popular language, of being “pulled in too many different directions” or “spread too thin.” As many have noted, the dissolution of the Catholic subculture is associated with lower levels of identification of young adults with the church as institution or community.5 However, sometimes overlooked is the reality that social ties are also thinner. Marriage seems to be the only tie with potential for thickness, and this is why romantic narratives of various types continue to dominate popular culture and shape views of marriage.6 In the midst of social fragmentation, romantic marriage is valued as the one relationship that can provide what is lacking, diminishing the necessity and importance of the rest of the fragmented world. Romance is supposed to sustain and fill those who have lost a larger sense of connectedness to church, neighborhood, and community.

This is a seductive story, and a powerful one, but it does not tell the whole truth about marriage. The tragedy of marital breakdown clearly shows that all marriages do not have a “happily ever after.” Though there has been some leveling off of the divorce rate in the last decade, a little less than half of all marriages still end in divorce, more than half of all second marriages break up, and about half of all children spend some of their childhood in single-parent homes.7 Moreover, since the early 1990s, it has become clear that divorce can cause as many problems as it solves. Social science researchers are mostly in agreement that children affected by divorce are worse off, on average, than their peers in intact families.8 Children of divorce are more likely to get pregnant before marriage, drop out of school, experience relationship problems, and get divorced.9 Men and women who leave difficult marriages are not guaranteed happiness either, and some studies find that they are less well off, on average, than those who stay married.10 In the case of marriages that are violent or high-conflict (about one-third of all marriages), civil divorce may be the best option. Still, the wide-ranging effects of divorce on individuals and society as a whole are difficult to underestimate, and the prevalence of divorce engenders less certainty about people’s ability to make and sustain commitments. Given this reality, romantic views of marriage fail to convince. People know from experience that it does not always work out this way, as much as they continue to hope that their marriages will turn out differently.

Even when romantic marriage does succeed at providing emotional satisfaction for spouses and children, it may still be less than it could be. A marriage that is simply private is limited in that it does not have anything more than itself to sustain it. Turned in upon itself, it has nowhere to go.11 Perhaps this is why there are so few cultural portrayals of marriage. It is not that the project of loving another person through time is uninteresting; there is great adventure in maintaining love through the inevitable difficulties and changes that both spouses will experience.12 But there is more pain and growth in the reality than the dominant cultural narratives allow, and much more to say about the ways in which married couples who love each other deeply are able to reach beyond the home and give themselves to others.

The Catholic tradition offers a way of seeing marriage that speaks more profoundly of both its reality and its potential. Within the Catholic narrative, marriages are not simply romantic relationships of two people finding mutual fulfillment in completion. Rather, marriage is situated within family, community, and church. Families are not isolated havens, but small, sacramental, grace-filled communities connected to and engaged in a larger world. Marriage is a sacrament, the Catholic tradition says, in love and pain, strength and weakness, intimate partnership and work for the common good. Marriage is also a covenantal relationship, sustained by public promises and capable of communicating to others the value of long-lasting love and fidelity. The Christian narrative offers an alternative vision more attuned to the human experience marked by strength and brokenness and better able to help spouses move beyond fragmentation and keep commitments to each other as well as to others in their community.

The difference between this understanding of marriage as a personal and social reality and the popular cultural view is striking. For example, the 2004 movie The Notebook caught the imagination of many high-school- and college-aged viewers who found its old-fashioned portrayal of romance inspiring. The film moves back and forth between past and present. An elderly man reads a love story to an elderly woman who struggles with Alzheimer’s disease. As he reads, it becomes clear that the story he tells is their story. They were love-struck teens who wanted to marry after a summer romance but were kept apart for years by the girl’s controlling mother. Their romance is striking because it is quaint, exuberant, and intense. The romantic story of the couple’s courtship and the realistic portrayal of the difficulties of Alzheimer’s they experienced at the end were attractive to many. Still, one is left to wonder, “What happened in between?” A viewer could be forgiven for looking into the faces o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Why Be Concerned with the Ordinary?
• Part I Resources from the Catholic Tradition
• Part II Practices
• Index