Trial Marriage: An Alternative View

Extract

A good friend of mine from Montreal, by profession a notary, told me two years ago that, judging from his experience since 1970, of the couples who come to register their marriages before proceeding to the Church, at least one in five gives the same address; meaning to say that, in the proportion of 20%, couples now seeking a Church-Marriage have been cohabiting for probably no less than a year. That figure, while not providing statistical evidence, is indicative of a trend which is gaining popularity among young people in my country—making sure their union has a chance to last before committing it to the punctilious care of the Church and Law—a trend not infrequently lamented by a sizable section of the clergy as a sad result of those young people’s loss of faith and lax morals.

Since then, I have crossed the ocean and settled in the country parish of Ngote, Tanzania, ministering to a Christian community hardly three generations old and, by God’s grace, still little touched by the mixed blessings of industrialisation. Yet of the 18 marriages celebrated in the parish in 1975, only five were between couples for whom Church-Marriage would mark the beginning of conjugal life. In 1970, such marriages had numbered 19 out of 37, while last year they were down to three out of 22. Those figures suggest that ‘trial-marriages, a troubling new fashion at home, are here becoming the norm.

Clearly linked to the issue of trial-marriage (in the sense, for this part of the world, of a matrimonial alliance locally acknowledged as legitimate even though still lacking the Church’s sanction and thus officially regarded as void by the Church) considered in this article is the problem of the decreasing ratio of Church-Marriages in relation to the overall number of conjugal unions entered upon by Church members.