At the Vatican conference on Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, that took place in Rome Oct. 7-14, one of the biggest talking points was the dwindling number of young people who are getting married in the Church.
“We cannot ignore the fact that the number of marriages is currently declining throughout the world, both civil marriages and marriages celebrated in the Church,” said Cardinal Kevin Farrell, prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, the Family, and Life.
Farrell said it is not just the clergy that is concerned with the declining rates, but the parents of young people too.
“Pastors are not alone in facing this concern. It is felt first and foremost by the many Christian parents whose children suffer from loneliness, remain hesitant to make a lasting commitment, or categorically reject the path that their parents themselves had embraced with joy,” he said.
The statistics are sobering: In the United States, for example, Catholic marriages have fallen by nearly 75 percent over roughly half a century even as the Catholic population has increased.
In Spain, in 2024 the country’s bishops’ conference said there were 31,462 Catholic weddings when in 2023 the number was 33,500. A recent report by CEU Demographic Observatory said nowadays that 20 percent or fewer weddings in Spain were Catholic while in 1976, this number was 99 percent.
Similar statistics are found all throughout the world, and not just in Catholic countries.
So what, exactly, is stopping young people getting married? And is the Church doing enough to promote the sacrament?
Wider cultural issues
During his remarks, Farrell cited divorce among parents, cultural attitudes, and the prevalence of different forms of cohabitation before marriage all as factors that reduced marriage among the young.
Emma McGowan, Director of the National Office for Marriage, Family and Life at the Scottish bishops’ conference told Crux Now that the Church has to reckon with the fact that marriage, in the wider culture, is no longer automatically seen as a good thing to pursue.
“There has been an assumption for a while that marriage was something that was valuable to the culture and so there wasn’t that much work for the church to do to convince people that it’s a good thing worth doing,” she said.
She pointed out that during the Amoris Laetitia conference it was highlighted that the lessening marriages is not “not a trend that is isolated to the secularizing West anymore.”
“In the church, we maybe haven’t been doing a huge amount of communicating on the goods of marriage, nor have we really been communicating what the vision is,” she said.
Instead, “we communicate the rules, like you can’t get divorced or can’t use contraception” rather than “tying that into a wider vision of the dignity of the human person and marriage as kind of a transcendental experience of God.”
For the wider culture, she said that marriage has become a “quite expensive rite of passage and then as that becomes less culturally viable, it kind of goes away” and that there were also “socioeconomic issues” that made it less likely.
Auxiliary Bishop Stephen Fernandes of Bombay, India, during the conference, spoke about the economic issues that make marriage more daunting for the young.
“For some, therefore, postponing marriage is not simply a rejection of marriage. It can reflect a crisis of confidence in the possibility of building a stable and enduring life with another person,” he said.
These obstacles include an impenetrable housing market, the high cost of weddings themselves, student debt, and the ever-increasing cost of childcare.
“Young people have not ceased to thirst for love. What has weakened for many is confidence that love can endure,” Fernandes said, before saying that marriage shouldn’t just be promoted as a social institution or obligation, but a vocation rooted in love and freedom.
However, McGowan believed the Church had special reason to be concerned because “if you don’t have Catholic marriages and you don’t have Catholics that are really committed and they’re raising their kids as Catholics, then you won’t have very many priests.”
Unconventional methods
So how, exactly, does the Church help Catholics get married? For some, the answer to that question requires creative thinking.
There is a priest in Spain, Father Fernando Cuevas Raposo, who has helped nearly 1300 people find a spouse, for which he has earned the moniker the “Tinder Priest.”
His method is simple: He receives requests for help on WhatsApp and then he asks them to fill out a simple questionnaire. Armed with that information, he then matches people.
His only strict requirements are that the people are over 25 and attend Sunday Mass.
“People are looking for true love. There is a yearning, an enormous need to love. People are in great need. They want to love truly, to forget themselves, to give of themselves, and to bring Christ into their lives,” he told ACI Prensa.
The Spanish priest, from Opus Dei, is not the only one looking for solutions.
Patrick McFarland, 24, is the co-founder of Vesper Club, a Catholic social club that arranges social events for young Catholics. These events range from Great Gatsby parties to visiting rooftop bars.
For McFarland, “if every event is under the parish rooftop, that maybe is a missed opportunity.”
And while the Vesper Club was not set up explicitly to help Catholics get married, it is undoubtedly a happy bonus if it does so.
“I think a lot of young people want to get married,” he told Crux Now. But the problem is that “the current lifestyle is just stitching loneliness into the life of many people.”
“And the more lonely you are, I would say the less likely you are to meet that special person,” he added.
“Most people work from home now or they’re not coming in to the office all the days of the week, or they’re speaking to AI more than they’re speaking to a friend, or they’re just scrolling on social media, seeing all of these lifestyles that aren’t theirs,” he said, meaning there is less space to meet people in an organic way.
Therefore, if you want to get married “you really have to be intentional and put yourself in the right places and oftentimes create those as we have.”
This, for McFarland, is what the Church could get better at doing: Creating organic spaces for people to meet.
“What I don’t love about some Catholic events is I don’t like walking in with a name tag. It feels like a networking event. It feels like LinkedIn,” he said to Crux Now.
No easy fix
McGowan, who herself is a convert who got married having met her husband at a university chaplaincy, said it is not as simple as creating better events for young people to meet, even though it is part of the solution.
She said parishes are serving the communities which is over 50 and although they “can get better” at organizing events young adults want to attend, it is difficult “asking them to do that when the community maybe isn’t obvious to them.”
“I can see how parishes may think the priest only has so much time. There’s only so much we can do here. We’re going to kind of seek to do something that serves our own community. I understand that,” she said.
“I don’t think that’s necessarily the best way to ensure the future,” she added.
She said it was vital the Church provide proper formation for marriage.
“Do I think people are ready to sign up to an indissoluble union that is open to life, and to sign up to the whole thing that we mean when we say marriage is Catholic? No, probably not. Do I think people have an innate desire for love, commitment, those kinds of things? Yes,” she said.
Thus, the solution is “trying to come at it from every angle.”
Farrell said the task for the Church now was to listen to people on the ground, especially those who have chosen to get married.
“We will also consider how attentive our communities are to the witness of those who, despite everything, choose marriage — whether early in life or later on — and how their experience can help us understand and present the vocation to marriage more effectively,” the cardinal said.
Charmaine Bernadette Villegas and Eren Lyle Villegas, a Filipino couple who work as missionaries missionaries with Couples for Christ in Rome, were one of 11 married couples who attended the conference to give their insights to the bishops.
Eren Lyle Villegas told OSV News that the best thing married couples can do is offer an example.
“We don’t want to force who we are as a married couple, but just simply living out as a witness of what we believe marriage is, and in the hope that they too will see it the way we see it,” he said.
Following Pope Leo XIV’s cancer scare, he has not had chance to share his thoughts on the conference’s findings.
It is expected that he will read the various reports that were submitted before offering his reflections on marriage and family life in the Catholic Church.
It is likely that he will touch on the crisis of marriage among the young and no doubt extol the benefits of marriage in a beautiful and meaningful manner.
Whether they will listen is another story. And while there are a number of creative and hardworking people toiling in this area, one thing is for sure: There will be no easy fix.
