Mary Olson knows a thing or two about marriage. The 93-year-old Farmer City resident has been in the same one for 75 years. (See story, page 1.) While she advises couples considering marriage to “make sure you’re ready to be married for life,” she’s troubled by the number of marriages that are ending in divorce.

Mary’s not alone.

“Americans break up at astonishingly high rates,” social scientist Barbara Dafoe Whitehead told an audience of Catholic family life ministers from throughout the U.S. meeting in St. Paul in late June. “As a people, we divorce more and remarry more than people in almost any other part of the world,” she is quoted in a Catholic News Service account of her talk, titled “State of Our Unions.”

Whitehead identified troubling trends threatening marriage today, including a split between marriage and parenthood and a shift from a public to private understanding of the marital bond.

Despite evidence that children do best when they are raised by two biological or adoptive parents in a stable, low-conflict marriage, Whitehead said the culture is moving away from marriage as the main childbearing and child-raising institution. Nearly four out of 10 children are born outside of marriage.

And marriage, added Whitehead, is also being seen less as a public, legal and religious institution and more as a private couple’s “soul mate” relationship that exists to promote personal growth, happiness and intimacy.

Those are good goals, she said, but “without the broader, religious institutional support for marriage, a ‘soul-mate’ relationship is very, very fragile.”

Mary Olson and other concerned Catholics who treasure the sacrament of marriage would be happy to know that the “huge majorities” of younger Catholics — the millennial generation — are showing a swing back toward traditional ideas. Many children of this generation have experienced divorce in their own families, and are determined not to divorce themselves, said Whitehead.

As we congratulate the Olsons and the hundreds of couples “only” married 50 or 25 years who will soon be recognized by the diocese for their faithful witness, we pray for all couples being married this year who, with God’s grace, will be golden anniversary couples in 2059. — Thomas J. Dermody, editor-in-chief, The Catholic Post