What Wisdom Can We Learn from Solomon about Mixed Marriages?

          The Church’s weekday readings recently have been focusing on Israel’s two great kings, David and Solomon.  Today’s reading focuses on the beginning of the end: after Solomon’s death, the united kingdom of Israel would break into two--the northern kingdom, keeping the name Israel, the southern kingdom to be known as Judah.  Each, in turn, would be wiped away, the North first by the Assyrians, the South later by the Babylonians.

          Today’s First Reading attributes why God allowed that to happen: Solomon’s syncretism.  “When Solomon was old his wives had turned his heart to strange gods, and his heart was not entirely with the LORD, his God ….”

          Israel had a covenant with God: “You will be my people, I will be your God.”  God always remained faithful; Israel, not so much.  Solomon, who had his own harem of wives, fell under the influence of many who worshipped the pagan gods – mostly fertility gods – of Israel’s neighbors.  Solomon, the “wise” king, succumbed to some of that worship.  The First Reading speaks specifically of Astarte, usually worshipped alongside Baal. She represented both sex, life, and war.

          If Israel would not keep her covenant with God, God would not necessarily prosper Israel – as a way of recalling her to her religious senses.  In the First Reading, the future division of Israel after Solomon’s death is foretold, attributed to Israel’s own divided religious loyalties.

          Meditating on that First Reading, I have to comment on a problem similar to Solomon’s we Catholics once discussed but now seem not to: mixed marriages.

          Once upon a time, Catholics understood clearly they should not consider mixed marriages.  It was discouraged.  When it happened, it often was not celebrated within Mass, sometimes not even in church but the rectory parlor.  The message was clear: this is a threat to your faith.  It’s why good Catholic women and men usually did not even start dating somebody they knew not to be Catholic.

          In theory, we still do not recommend mixed marriages.  We still canonically demand certain permissions from the diocesan bishop for such marriages and we still insist at least the Catholic party commit to raising any children in the faith.  But the demands are often pro forma, the dispensations readily granted.  The dangers of mixed marriages are rarely talked about and largely omitted from catechesis. 

          The result: mixed marriages have increased and, along with them, indifference to faith.  If one is looking for a way of turning the “religious” into the “spiritual,” this is a pretty good way to do it – especially in a cohort (20- and 30-somethings) whose exodus from the Church is the stuff sociologists comment upon regularly.

          Instead, further excuses are manufactured to rationalize the pastoral disaster of current practice.  “Mixed marriage: is out; “ecumenical” (Catholic/other Christian) and even “interfaith” marriage is in.  Two people who cannot agree on a common faith in one house are now to be “accompanied” to intercommunion, even though they have different and largely incompatible understandings (if the Catholic has an understanding at all) of what the “Eucharist” is.  Dispensation of form – waivers of canonical law to allow a marriage before a non-Catholic minister – are usually not hard to come by.

          This is National Marriage Week, an observance the Church shares. Isn’t it time we started talking about what marriage means for a Catholic?

          And if marriage is to be a point of unity between two people, how does one pretend there is a “unity” present when so basic an idea as God and how God is to be worshipped and served is clearly a point of division in the domestic church that is the family?  When two people do not share the same church on a Sunday, that is a division, no matter how much we want to paper it over about “being an example to others” and all the other things that bind us.  Nor is it just the business of the spouses: when a family is permanently divided – even if that division is as truce – it sends a clear message to the next generation that religion is either unimportant or a baneful influence best steered clear of.  After 50 years of mixed marriage indulgence, I would love to see a solid study of first and second generational impact of growing up in a mixed marriage on subsequent faith and religious practice.

          Today’s First Reading sends a clear message of the dangers religious division in the house augurs in the house and beyond it.  Perhaps it can be a wakeup call about the dangers of mixed marriages. Solomon’s tragedy did not begin with apostasy but with accommodation. What divided his heart eventually divided a kingdom. The Church would be unwise to forget how often religious compromise begins quietly — and how rarely it remains contained.