# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1959_S215
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

PARISH EDUCATION 215

2) Religious differences always imply wide areas of conflict.
3) Church loyalties and family loyalties will usually clash.
4) Tensions with in-laws are often acute.

5) The upbringing of children presents constant problems.

Study 4: Ave Maria Report, 1956, by Ave Maria Press, Notre
Dame, Ind. Three separate studies in Michigan, Maryland, and
Washington, covering a total of 24,184 families, revealed that
divorce and separation are “about three times higher in mixed
Catholic-Protestant marriages than in marriages where both parties
are of the same faith.” In one study of 132 parishes in the East
and Middle West, Father John Thomas, S.J., found that 39.6 per
cent of all mixed marriages were not sanctioned by Catholic nup-
tials. A survey by the Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Mixed Mar-
riage, covering seven archdioceses and 43 dioceses from 1932 to
1941, found that about 30 per cent of Catholics involved in a mixed
marriage became lost to the faith. The 1956 Official Catholic Direc-
tory reports 84,720 valid mixed marriages out of a total of 324,907
marriages involving a Catholic. This means that only one marriage
out of every four which involved a Catholic party was listed as
valid, that is, approved by the church and witnessed by a priest.
(Figures compiled from The Official Catholic Directory, copy-
righted 1956 by P. J. Kenedy and Sons.) The report also states,
“The divorce and separation rate is also about three times higher
in mixed Catholic-Protestant marriages than in marriages where

both parties are of the same faith. The best evidence we have
indicates that in the United States the promises made in mixed
marriages that the children will be raised as Catholics are not kept
in about 30 per cent of all mixed marriages. One YMCA survey
found that where one parent was Protestant and the other Catholic,
only 34 per cent of their sons were practicing members of either

faith.”

ROMAN CATHOLIC STATEMENTS

“The Church everywhere most severely forbids the contracting
of marriage between two baptized persons of whom one is a Cath-
olic whereas the other is a member of a heretical or schismatic
sect; and if there is danger of perversion for the Catholic party
and the children, the marriage is forbidden also by the divine law.”
(Canon 1050, quoted, Colacci, p. 18)

“The non-Catholic party shall have given a guarantee to re-
move all danger of perversion from the Catholic party, and both
parties shall have given guarantees to baptize and educate all the
children in the Catholic faith alone.” (Canon 1061, quoted, Colacci,
p. 110) :