The Vatican’s assembly on ‘Amoris Laetitia’ is putting in the spotlight a global breakdown of marriage and the family, including in traditionally Catholic countries like Poland and the Philippines.
As the heads of bishops’ conferences from around the world gather in the Vatican for a Oct. 7-14 global summit on the family, discussions about the deterioration of marriage and the family are increasingly including countries that once stood as bastions of strong family life.
While issues such as cohabitation, divorce, and low marriage and fertility rates are typically associated with Western secularization, statistics are increasingly showing that these issues are taking root in Africa, Asia, and even once-strong Catholic countries like Poland and the Philippines.
“Western marriage problems are moving east, south,” Mark Regnerus, the president of the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture, told the Register. “So things that are happening in the United States are bleeding elsewhere as well.”
Similar concerns have been expressed inside the walls of the Paul VI Synod Hall, where 200 Church leaders are discussing challenges facing the family 10 years after Pope Francis’ promulgation of Amoris Laetitia.
In his Oct. 8 remarks to the assembly, Cardinal Filipe Neri Ferrão of Goa, India, said that while the “the family remains the bedrock of society” across Asia, “family life is undergoing profound and radical transitions,” including the emergence of cohabitation “amid changing understandings of gender and relationships in urban settings.”
Julie Hanlon Rubio, a Santa Clara University theologian serving as an expert at the gathering, told the assembly on Oct. 12 that “the global trend away from marriage is accelerating,” citing declining marriage rates in the Philippines, Poland, Argentina and South Africa.
“The trends of declining marriage and fertility, of weddings and baptisms, have arrived in some places, are just emerging in others, and are being resisted in a few, but historians who study the development of marriage and family suggest that decline will continue to spread,” said Rubio, noting that “we seem to be entering a new stage in which marriage is increasingly optional.”
Problematic ‘Western Model’
According to Regnerus, who was in Rome during the Amoris Laetitia event, a major contributor to the decline of marriage worldwide is the exportation of a Western approach that sees marriage as a “capstone” event, entered into only after individuals have established their adult lives.
This approach, common in the United States and other affluent countries, creates a model of marriage as a commodity rather than a necessity. As a result, fewer couples choose to get married, and those who do are tying the knot much later in life.
“The Western model is not a strength,” he said. “Since we don’t need marriage, but we still want marriage, we marry with lots of strings attached.”
Regnerus noted with concern that the “strings-attached” model, which is associated with cohabitation, falling birth rates and increased divorce, is beginning to replace the functional model of marriage in parts of the world that don’t share the economical and personal stability of Western countries.
“[In many countries] you need marriage because it works and your life will be poorer without it, but that’s not what marriage looks like in an American marriage, or a French marriage, or a Spanish marriage,” he said. “But since we have penetrated them with our culture, they see what we have both economically and [in] marriage and family, and they start sort of wanting similar things. But those things aren’t necessarily good things.”
Regnerus added that the advent of high-speed media has allowed Western images of marriage to reach even the hinterlands of Africa via social media and pop culture, shifting people’s understanding of the institution.
“They want marriage [to be] like ours,” he said.
According to Father Paul Sullins, senior research associate at the Ruth Institute and a retired professor at The Catholic University of America, the current breakdown of the family “is not simply a Western phenomenon,” but instead “a property of modernity itself since at least the Industrial Revolution.”
He told the Register, “What modernity has done, in all spheres of life, is to reinterpret institutions in terms of their functions. The former functions of the family — sexual expression, economic independence, childbearing, education of children, definition of male/female roles, and intergenerational solidarity — have all been separated out for people to pursue independent of family commitments.”
Worldwide Declines
Even in countries that have historically had strong Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic identities, the state of the family as an institution is looking increasingly grim.
In one particularly problematic example, Regnerus pointed to Poland, where the number of marriages has dropped by almost 30%. Data from the state-run statistics agency showed that the nation’s birth rate in 2024 was the lowest it has been since the beginning of the 19th century, and the fertility rate, already well below replacement level, is continuing to plummet.
Countries in the Global South aren’t exempt from the contagion of familial decline. A recent study found that South Africa’s marriage rate dropped from above 3 per 1,000 people in the early 2000s to approximately 1.7 per 1,000 in 2023, while the median age for marriage for both men and women has increased by more than seven years in the past two decades. Cohabitation is also on the rise, with approximately 61% of births in South Africa now occurring outside of marriage, according to the study.
According to Cardinal Oswald Gracias, archbishop emeritus of the Archdiocese of Bombay in India, secularism has had a profound effect in Asia, particularly in urban areas. He added that new challenges, such as an increase in mixed marriages (in which one party is Catholic and the other is non-baptized), present an additional call for a new pastoral approach.
“These families too need to be accompanied specially. We are now moving to a new approach, where senior families accompany junior ones,” said Cardinal Gracias, adding that religious sisters can also help lead dioceses’ marriage ministries.
Hopes for Vatican Meeting
This week’s Vatican gathering is an attempt to continue development of a pastoral framework that seeks to both uphold the beauty of the family and minister to those in difficult familial situations with grace and tenderness.
Cardinal Gracias expressed his hopes that the Vatican meeting will offer “encouragement for better preparation for marriage, better accompaniment specially in the initial years, assistance for marriages facing difficulties, and more effective and competent marriage tribunals” as a pastoral approach for families in the Global South.
While hoping the summit will be a source of connection and encouragement for the bishops, Regnerus also noted that he doesn’t expect significant doctrinal or pastoral developments to emerge from the gathering.
“It’s the first big meeting they’ve had on marriage,” he said. “And since it’s not a formal synod with voting on paragraphs, it’s more of a consultation. So we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Even so, Regnerus emphasized that both “a visionary bishop and active laity” are necessary in the restoration of thriving Catholic family life around the world.
“[Bishops] tend to think they don’t have a lot of influence locally, except with the faithful,” he said. “But they’re exemplars. Their teaching matters a great deal.”
