As I’ve been writing and exploring data about Catholics in Australia today, I’ve found something else that I want to share with you. It’s about marriage.
Australian Catholics really embraced “mixed” marriages—marriages between a Catholic and a non-Catholic—once the church loosened up the requirements for this in 1966.
Every year, all our Catholic marriage data goes into the Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae, the church’s statistical yearbook, which is where I got these figures.
For the next 30 years, there were more “mixed” marriages than Catholic-only ones in Australia. This is important because I think it’s changed our pattern of Sunday mass-going.
But from 2000, the percentage of Catholic-only marriages began to rise. In 2021, 61 per cent of all Catholic marriages were between two Catholics.
Two other things have happened to Catholic marriage in Australia in recent decades. The first is that the number of couples getting married in the presence of a Catholic priest has plunged.
In 2000, there were around 8,900 of these marriages. By 2021, it was down to around 3,300 marriages.
Most Australians, over 80 per cent, choose to marry in civil ceremonies instead of in church. The ones who still want a church wedding are likely to be going to church on a regular basis.
So it’s probably safe to assume most nominal Catholics in Australia are now marrying in registry offices, rather than in the presence of a priest.
The ones who are getting married in the presence of a priest are more likely to be regular massgoers.
And now, here’s the really exciting thing. From 2008 to 2020, the Australian Bureau of Statistics shared extra data on the people being married in religious ceremonies.
The ABS reported whether each party was born in Australia, born in the same country overseas, or born in two different countries.
In 2008, 72 per cent of all Catholic marriages in the presence of a priest took place between two Australian-born people.
But by 2020, that had fallen to just 64 per cent, while marriages of Catholics born in two different countries had risen to 28 per cent.
Then the ABS stopped reporting the data, just when it was getting interesting. But I was so glad to see even this small window, because it confirmed what I’d seen in my own Catholic community.
Young Catholics who want to marry can’t find spouses easily for many reasons. This might be why they are now more willing to marry across ethnic and cultural lines.
This is important for two reasons. First, as our Mass-going population shrinks and becomes more ethnically and culturally diverse, we face problems at parish level.
As older Australian-born Catholics become a minority in some parishes, it’s harder for them to socialise and mix easily with migrant Catholic communities.
It’s a novel experience and not always a comfortable one for them, especially if the priest is also from a migrant background.
Some of the loudest complaints in the Catholics in Australia survey in 2022 were about this, and they were all from older Catholics.
This is one of the challenges we need to face now. One of the ways we will overcome it is through more Catholic marriages that bring different cultures and ethnicities together.
Second, as migrant Catholic families age, more Catholics will be born in Australia and grow up with similar lifestyles to non-migrant Catholics. Marrying someone from a different ethnicity will become less scary and more likely.
As the Catholics who belong to the sui juris Eastern Catholic Churches in Australia become fewer, they are already seeing their kids marrying across rites, adding further complexities to the mix—to whose church and tradition do the grandkids belong?
I know that what I’m saying will horrify many—both migrant and non-migrant, Eastern and Western—because of prejudices on both sides. But I think it’s exciting.
It makes me think of what the early church must have been like, as they absorbed the reality of “in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek” (Gal 3:28-29).
Christians were a persecuted minority. Those who decided to get married almost certainly had to choose fellow Christians who were outside their own class, ethnicity, or culture.
The main thing was to find another Christian who agreed with you that marriage was for life, that it was a holy thing, and that children and old people were to be protected.
The Graeco-Roman world around them didn’t prize these people or values. Women and children were chattels, and divorce, cohabitation, and infanticide were common.
What mattered then and now is to share your faith and orient your marriage to the action of God every day.