Day 223: Differences in Religion in Marriage

In many countries, the situation of a mixed marriage (marriage between a Catholic and a baptized non-Catholic) often arises. It requires particular attention on the part of couples and their pastors. A case of marriage with disparity of cult (between a Catholic and a nonbaptized person) requires even greater circumspection. CCC 1633

In today's reading, the Catechism discusses the growing phenomenon of mixed marriages. That is, when one spouse is Catholic while the other is not. This didn't occur as much in the past as it does nowadays.

The Catechism Compendium summarizes Catholic teaching on this:

A mixed marriage (between a Catholic and a baptized non-Catholic) needs, for liceity, the permission of ecclesiastical authority. In a case of disparity of cult (between a Catholic and a non-baptized person), a dispensation is required for validity. In both cases, it is essential that the spouses do not exclude the acceptance of the essential ends and properties of marriage. It is also necessary for the Catholic party to accept the obligation, of which the non-Catholic party has been advised, to persevere in the faith and to assure the baptism and Catholic education of their children. (#345)

In some cases, such mixed marriages can lead to the conversion of the non-Catholic spouse (CCC 1637), while in others, it does not. Sadly, it can also lead to religious indifference on the part of both spouses. This was the case with my own parents, and why I highly recommend that if no conversion is sought by the non-Catholic spouse, such marriages be avoided. There will be children involved at some point, and they will be impacted. 

The Catechism Companion, Vol II, comments on this:

When a husband or a wife is not pursuing the Lord with his or her whole heart, mind, soul, and strength, it can lead the other spouse to treat religion as unimportant. (p. 210)

Really, this can also happen to both spouses.

I love and cherish my parents dearly. Yet, my father is a fallen-away Southern Baptist, and my mother is a fallen-away Catholic, which led to neither practicing the faiths they held at the time of their marriage. They received the dispensation for the marriage from Church authorities, and my siblings and I were baptized, but we never went to church as a family while growing up. Not once. This left my siblings and me to find God on our own. Even all these years later, I feel like I have "gaps" in my religious knowledge and practice, after having arrived where I'm at, through God's grace, essentially on my own. They may have felt that they didn't "burden" me with the doctrines of one faith over another, which I can understand to an extent, but I believe it was a worse situation. It caused me years of confusion and floating from one group to another, including indifferentism, before finally coming to the Church. I've felt like I'm playing "catch-up" ever since.