I have been an active and devout Catholic my entire life, and my wife is faithfully and resolutely Protestant. We both strive to make our Christian faith the center of every aspect of our life, including our marriage, despite the fact that we come from and continue to follow different faith traditions.
Still, when I had coffee with our parish priest to discuss my interest in teaching in our parish adult Christian initiation program, I mentioned our differing beliefs to him. I admire my wife’s strong and vibrant faith, but I admit that it makes me worry about how we are perceived by some in our parish. I was afraid it might somehow compromise my ability to lead newcomers into the church, especially since most of them would be coming from Protestant backgrounds, like my wife.
It was not easy to start this conversation. But I needn’t have worried. Our priest was enthusiastic. He pointed out that this kind of “mixed Christian marriage” is increasingly common, and having laypeople representing a happy, faithful, “mixed” marriage in the parish will give others a sense of shared experience and someone relatable to talk with.
Of course, our marriage, like any relationship, takes work. My wife and I took a long time to develop a mutually supportive and robust sense of shared faith. Before we began dating, we each shared mixed experiences of encounters with the other’s faith background. Personal and historical baggage at times inspired competition or comparison rather than collaboration in our discussions on faith. We loved each other and we wanted to be married, so the pressure to find a compromise added to the strain of our religious debates.
Everything changed when we realized that we were having rich and fruitful conversations about faith, not in spite of our different perspectives but because of them. What began as challenging debate evolved into a supportive and ongoing dialogue. It occurred to me that if I had married a Catholic woman with a similar perspective, as I had imagined I would, I would have missed out on this kind of lively faith building discussion that my wife and I now treasure. Being challenged in my faith encourages me to engage in it more deeply, rather than slip into a kind of spiritual inertia that does not nurture a healthy, growing faith life.
We found that these discussions have become an engine that drives our mutual growth in God. My Catholic identity and my wife’s Protestant identity continue to endure, and our faith has developed together in greater harmony, knowing that our love for each other was ultimately grounded in our love for God. To emphasize this understanding of our marriage, we engraved our wedding rings with a reference to the passage from Ecclesiastes that describes a rope as stronger with three cords, an image popularly used to illustrate that God is the transcendent third party in a marriage.
When I began a theology program at Marquette University, I found myself drawn to the subject of ecumenism as an area of emphasis, perhaps because of the way I have experienced it in our marriage and the way it shaped my own faith. Eccumenism is an important aspect of the post-Vatican II church, and yet it seems underdiscussed among the laity, especially considering the growing proportion of “mixed Christian marriages.”
As in our marriage, much of the ecumenical progress made between the Catholic Church and various Protestant denominations evolved gradually and had to overcome a sense of embattled competition before building a collaborative, respectful atmosphere. The recent progress in ecumenism is more than just abstract, theological discourse. Significant advances have been made in repairing historic animosity, and even violence, between churches, establishing theological common ground as new focal points in dialogue, as well as creating new spaces for meaningful, collaborative outreach where different Christian churches pool resources and work together. These ecumenical milestones are recorded famously in Cardinal Walter Kasper’s book Harvesting the Fruits. Cardinal Kasper stresses that ecumenism is not about relativism or agreeing on the lowest common denominator. Rather, it is a matter of taking our theological differences seriously and seeking common ground while being careful not to minimize our very real disagreements.
Cardinal Kasper observes that the broad aim of ecumenism is unity in Christ. It is also the guiding principle that my wife and I use to characterize our marriage, as our ring inscriptions remind us. This ideal of Christian unity is a common thread in all the major ecumenical works, including the Second Vatican Council’s “Decree on Ecumenism” (Unitatis Redintegratio). The introduction to this document boldly states that believers who are content with division in Christianity proceed as though Christ himself were divided. It goes on to state that those who seek unity are witnesses to the triune God, either as individuals or institutions. The document emphasizes that the laity must live out ecumenism on behalf of the church through different aspects of daily life, including marriage.
There are many reasons why I think the average parishioner would benefit from learning more about ecumenical family life between Christian denominations. A personally relevant one is that ecumenism provided a vocabulary for me to better understand my marriage and to situate it in my family’s parish life. Our marriage is not just an image of ecumenism; it is a real micro-example of ecumenism being lived out by regular Christians. Our discussions push our faith to grow and evolve, but we do this in the ecumenical spirit by recognizing that our unity is in Christ and our marriage is given to us by the Holy Spirit. This is why I now think of us as having an ecumenical marriage, rather than a “mixed Christian” marriage. Like the post-conciliar church and its denominational partners, we let the discussions about our real differences lead us to unity in Christ.
Before we were married, we assumed one of us would end up feeling like a guest at the other’s church. That changed at the marriage encounter retreat we did in preparation for our wedding. We had to discuss why we wanted to get married in the Catholic Church. I tried to explain that to me, the church was like the vine that connected us to Jesus, to each other and to other Christian denominations. My wife later told me that conversation helped her see what being involved in a Catholic parish meant to me. She said: “After that talk, I really felt like it was my church too, even if I don’t totally agree with you theologically.” Similarly, I thrive off of her ability to make a relationship with Jesus the lens though which she sees everything. It makes every interaction she has a kind of prayer, and her example has helped me evolve more spiritually than any theology I have studied. At church, she is deep in prayer when I return to the pew after Communion and we hold hands. This, to me, illustrates the fruits of ecumenism.
