The FLDS situation has brought certain social issues back into the spotlight, the most prominent being early marriage. It is alleged that some (probably not many) FLDS females marry and conceive children when they are as young as 13. This – quite apart from the related issues of forced (arranged?) marriage and polygamy – has scandalized many people and is often cited as an abuse in itself. Therefore I think the question of early marriage deserves its own treatment, lest we Catholics get carried off by media presuppositions and the winds of popular opinion.
The demise of early marriage is a significant cause of the culture of immorality that surrounds us today. Most people are not particularly zealous for virtue, even in the best of times. Yet, they can be enticed by social norms to live generally moral lives – and one of the most important of these norms is a culture of early marriage. By “early” I do not mean 13, necessarily, but an age of 15-22 for most people. That is the age when hormones are naturally raging, and they are raging for the natural purpose of finding and keeping a spouse.
Postponing marriage beyond these years frustrates the design of the Creator for all but the most virtuous. Some are indeed called to celibate religious vocations, and others to celibacy in the world, and they are promised the necessary graces to live out these vocations. But such people are never the majority in any society. For the majority, the result of frustrating nature is the emergence of an open culture of fornication and vice, in which legions of marriageable but unmarried people end up accumulating a vast number of sexual partners before getting married.
The median age for marriage has now reached 25 for women, and 27 for men. The median age for first intercourse is still about 17. As a result, today’s women average six partners in a lifetime, while men average twenty (the male average is skewed by a small number of men reporting a very large number of partners). Obviously the trend toward late marriages, because it results in high rates of promiscuity, contributes indirectly to all of the ills associated with promiscuity. According to Michael P. Orsi:
“This tendency toward later marriage or no marriage has been the cause of a great deal of our social deterioration. The high incidence of pre-marital sex, a decrease in population, a higher incidence of infertility, a growth of the abortion industry, the financial burden placed on society due to out of wedlock births causing single-parent households, an increase in sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), the rise of homosexual activity, the widespread use of birth control, and a reported higher rate of loneliness and depression among the unmarried compared to married couples of the same age, are all indicative of the moral and spiritual conundrum that delayed marriage or no marriage has caused for society and for young people who want to live a Christian life but find the burden of containing their sexual urges unbearable during their artificially protracted adolescence.”
What about teen pregnancy? Isn’t that supposed to be a bad thing? Frederica Mathewes-Green writes:
“By the age of 18, a young woman’s body is well prepared for childbearing. Young men are equally qualified to do their part. Both may have better success at the enterprise than they would in later years, as some health risks — Cesarean section and Down Syndrome, for example — increase with passing years. (The dangers we associate with teen pregnancy, on the other hand, are behavioral, not biological: drug use, STD’s, prior abortion, extreme youth, and lack of prenatal care.) A woman’s fertility has already begun to decline at 25 — one reason the population-control crowd promotes delayed childbearing. Early childbearing also rewards a woman’s health with added protection against breast cancer.
Younger moms and dads are likely be more nimble at child-rearing as well, less apt to be exhausted by toddlers’ perpetual motion, less creaky-in-the-joints when it’s time to swing from the monkey bars. I suspect that younger parents will also be more patient with boys-will-be-boys rambunction, and less likely than weary 40-somethings to beg pediatricians for drugs to control supposed pathology. Humans are designed to reproduce in their teens, and they’re potentially very good at it. That’s why they want to so much.
Teen pregnancy is not the problem. Unwed teen pregnancy is the problem. It’s childbearing outside marriage that causes all the trouble. Restore an environment that supports younger marriage, and you won’t have to fight biology for a decade or more.”
What is the teaching and practice of the Catholic Church concerning early marriage? It is well known that the Blessed Virgin Mary was likely 13 or 14 years old when pregnant with Our Lord, and her husband Joseph many years her senior, in some traditions a widower of advanced age. Contrary what many have been led to believe, the Church has always sanctioned early marriage. From the Catholic Encyclopedia:
“The marriageable age is fourteen full years in males and twelve full years in females, under penalty of nullity (unless natural puberty supplies the want of years). Marriages void because of the absence of legal or natural puberty are held as sponsalia, inducing thereby impediment of “public decorum” (Cap. 14, tit. de despon. impub., X, 4, 2). Civil codes generally require a more advanced age than the canonical. Dispensations, however, as to the required ages are expressly granted by France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Romania, and Russia. The marriageable age in France, Italy, Belgium, and Roumania is eighteen for men, and fifteen for women. (France requires also, under penalty of nullity, the consent of parents); Holland, Switzerland, Russia (Caucasian Provinces excepted), fifteen and thirteen; and Hungary fixes the age at eighteen and sixteen; Austria, fourteen for both parties; Denmark, twenty and sixteen; Germany, twenty-one (minors set free by parents at eighteen) and sixteen years respectively. Marriages contracted in Germany below the ages aforesaid are valid but illicit. In India natives marry under canonical age. So also in China, where there is a further deviation from canonical age, owing to the Chinese method of reckoning age by lunar rather than solar years (thirteen lunar months make a solar year). The canonical age holds in England, Spain, Portugal, Greece (Ionian Isles excepted, where it is sixteen and fourteen), and as regards Catholics even in Austria. While in some parts of the United States the canonical marriage age of fourteen and twelve still prevails, in others it has been enlarged by statutes. Such statutes, however, as a rule, do not make void marriages contracted by a male and femals of fourteen and twelve years respectively, unless the statute expressly forbids them under penalty of nullity. The English Common Law age of fourteen in males and twelve in females prevails in all the Canadian provinces, with the exception of Ontario and Manitoba. Ontario requires fourteen years, and Manitoba sixteen years, in both parties. Marriages contracted at more youthful ages than these are not irreparably null and void. They can be, and are, ratified by continued cohabitation after the prescribed age.”
As further evidence, the royal marriages of England – blessed by the Catholic Church – are instructive:
“King Stephen’s wife, Matilda, was only 14 in 1119 when she married …
[King ] John’s choice of second wife was Isabella of Angoulême, who was only about 13 when she married him in 1200, and about twenty years her husband’s junior …
Isabella’s eldest son, Henry III, succeeded to the throne at the age of nine, but waited almost 20 years before marrying. His bride, Eleanor of Provence, was only 13, and had never met her 28-year old husband before the day of the wedding …
As part of the settlement of a dispute of the territory of Gascony, Henry III and Alfonso X of Castile arranged the marriage of Henry’s son, Edward, to Alfonso’s sister, Eleanor. The marriage took place in 1254, when he was 15 and she 13 …
Eleanor died in 1290, and three years later, Edward set his heart on the young Blanche of France, who was famed for her beauty. In order to win her, the king even agreed to surrender Gascony to France, only to discover later that he had been duped and she was already betrothed to a German truce. King Philippe IV of France offered the English king Blanche’s younger sister, Marguerite, instead, but a furious Edward entered upon a five-year war against the French. When peace was signed, marriage to Marguerite was part of the agreement. Edward I was 60, Marguerite was 17 when they married …
The contrast with the marriage of the next king, Edward II, couldn’t have been greater. He, too, married a young French princess, Isabella, who was 12 at the time of their marriage …
Edward III also married a young bride, Philippa of Hainault, but, at 15, he was close to her age. Their marriage was a successful one, lasting over 40 years (until her death in 1369) and producing 14 children, the first (Edward the Black Prince) born when she was about 16 …
The Black Prince predeceased his father and on Edward’s death the throne passed to his grandson, Richard II. Richard was only 15 when he married his first wife, Anne of Bohemia, who was a few months older than him …
Margaret of Anjou was 16 when she married Henry VI who was about six years her senior …
Catherine Howard’s age when she married Henry VIII in 1540 is uncertain, but she is believed to have been between 15 and 20, while Henry was 50 …
The final two teenagers to marry English kings were Henrietta Maria of France, who married Charles I in 1625 at the age of 16, and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who married George III in 1761 when she was 17. Both marriages were loving ones …”
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