My Daughter, It Is a Good Thing That Your Husband Be a Practicing Catholic

My daughter, it is a good thing that your husband be a practicing Catholic.

That sentence sounds like prejudice. I will own the sound of it.

I am not telling you to marry a man because he can recite a creed or because his name is on a parish register. A name on a register is not a conscience. I am saying something narrower: it is a good thing if the man who shares your life has a place to take his failures (besides the bottle, a drug, or silence) and a measure for his vocation (that did not come out of his own mood).

Years ago a young woman asked me what the benefits of being an active Catholic were. I did not start with metaphysics. I said an active Catholic, if he is honest, is trained to become a better husband, father, employee, employer, and neighbor. Then I showed her a list. She looked at it longer than I expected. I think she was surprised the list existed.

That is still the whole argument, almost.

Society does not hand him a vocation

A marriage license does not contain it. A university does not hand it to a young man with his diploma. A branch of service does not issue it with a seabag. The culture and our society will tell him to communicate, go on date night, never go to bed angry, and be a partner. Those are not nothing. They are also not a vocation. They do not tell him what to examine and self-reflect on when he is tired, proud, bored, or quietly resentful.

Conscience is not a vibe. It is a judgment: the inner act by which a person recognizes, in this concrete hour, this is good, this is not. An examination of conscience is simply that judgment made deliberate. Confession is what a Catholic does with the judgment once he stops lying to himself. The list I am talking about sits between those two things. It is not the sacrament. It is the work that keeps the sacrament from becoming a performance.

Summarize at:

What a practicing Catholic husband is asked

A practicing Catholic husband is supposed to walk toward a small room and answer questions like these, first to himself and then to God.

Has he gone to Mass, or only occupied a pew with a blank mind?
Has he prayed as a man, not as a mood?
Has he let the truths of the faith change how he thinks and acts, or kept them in a drawer marked Sunday?
Has he asked the Holy Spirit to help him be a proper husband and father, or assumed temperament would be enough?

Has he been generous with his time toward his wife, or only with what was left over?
Has he told her he loves her or assumed she knows?
Has he listened, actually sought out her worries, or waited for her to manage the weather of the house alone?
Has he let bitterness take root and then watered it?
Has he spoken sharply, teased to wound, and used a name that is not her name?
Has he manipulated to get his way?
Has he been moody and sullen and called it personality?
Has he been truthful with her?
Has he treated their intimacy as a gift they give each other or as a demand, a weapon, or a private escape?
Has he been financially responsible or left her to carry the quiet panic?

None of that is “churchy” in the thin sense. It is the ordinary work of not ruining a home. The difference is that the Church does not leave it to inspiration. She puts it on a page and asks him to look at it before he says he is sorry.

The same man is asked about his children, if he has them. Not only whether he paid for shoes and travel ball. Whether he cared for their souls. Whether he prayed with them. Whether he hugged them and said the sentence grown men forget: I love you. Whether he corrected them out of love or out of irritation. Whether he and their mother were one heart in the raising or two competing courts. Whether he undermined her in front of them. Whether he kept one standard for them and another for himself.

And he is asked about the world outside the door. Whether he is honest at work. Whether he pays what he owes. Whether he nurses hatred toward people who vote wrong. Whether he has made a habit of looking down on someone for race, religion, or class. Whether the poor are a slogan or a person.

You can live a decent life without ever seeing that list. Plenty of men do. What you cannot do is pretend the list is a sectarian invention. It describes a man who has agreed not to be the center of his own house.

I go through it because I fail parts of it. That is the point of the booth. The practice does not produce saints on a schedule. It produces men who cannot claim they were never told what husband and father require.

Fathers and mothers who want the same thing for a son, a daughter, or an in-law are not asking for a mascot. They are asking for a man who has been taught to examine himself under four headings the bishops put in order for a reason: God first, then the spouse, then the children, then the society that will inherit whatever he refused to repair at home.

Summarize at:

The bishops’ list for married persons

Look at the document. It is not a private scorecard, and it is not mine. It is the United States bishops’ Examination of Conscience for Married Persons. Responsibilities to God. To the spouse. To the children. To society.