In early 2015, our Archdiocese like many others was offered a 47-question open-ended survey in order to gather information about what people throughout the world understand about the Church’s teaching, her pastoral practice, current conditions, and the reality of marriage and family life. The survey was probably a poor translation, and the questions were ill-structured, so I ended up writing about 15,500 words in the one week window for completing it. I have chosen to share a few of these, here, as well, for your comments. I will quote the question, and what follows is my answer. I have edited the answers slightly for brevity, politeness, and clarity.
9. What marriage and family values can be seen to be realized in the life of young people and married couples? What form do they take? Are there values which can be highlighted? (cf. n. 13) What sinful aspects are to be avoided and overcome?
There are a number of goods aspired to by adolescents approaching adulthood, and sometimes those goods are realized in a lifetime of fruitful marriage (not forgetting the coordinate goods of celibacy and single service). As a college professor, I can tell you that most students do imagine future lives as including marriage and family, and they are motivated to consider problems such as providing for and educating families. However, they have been brought up in a culture that provides no clear path from dependent childhood to responsible married life, preferring to multiply distractions and prolong adolescence. This “youth culture” is a seedbed of profoundly debilitating ideological delusions. Compounding this, even the brightest students are taught to emulate teachers and members of elite culture whose faulty anthropology and political ideology pits them against the “heteronormativity” (as they call it) of family life. Young people comfortable with a hedonistic, consumerist lifestyle are therefore kept in perpetual adolescence by their commercial culture, while those interested in growth and the common good are taught to celebrate everything except intergenerational family culture, and to regard traditional marriage as a negotiation for power rather than a unique good.
Under these conditions, the goods of marriage would be hard enough to attain even if our culture had not taken as axiomatic the exploded pseudo-psychology of Freud, in which sexual drive is a deterministic constant which varies only in its expression, and “heterosexual” marriage a conventionalization of that expression for purposes of social utility—a view of marriage now inaccurately regarded as “traditional” by many well-meaning people and by many academics critical of intergenerational family culture. Under these conditions, almost all people are persuaded that it is “healthy” to express sexual impulses and “unhealthy” not to do so, and that reasonable patience and acceptance of limitation in sexual desire is “repression.” For those so taught, all relationships are modifications of a drive to sexual mastery of others, the modifications being more or less successful from one situation to another. When people so taught are offered no alternative to the infantilizing “youth culture” but a “liberating” ethic of suspicion against family culture, their normal sexual impulses are thwarted; for many, there is no correspondence of their desires, the end of those desires, teaching and practice in fitting those desires to their ends, or even social reinforcement for seeking such fitness. As a result, the sexual practices of college students are not so much promiscuous as thoroughly confused, incoherent both rationally and socially. Unfortunately, that confusion does not eliminate the consequences of sinful behavior.