The Maryland Catholic Conference, summoning its flock
to keep America’s original Catholic colony from adopting same-sex
marriage, thanked “the thousands of Maryland Catholics who have raised
their voices in
recent weeks in support of our society’s foundational institution – the
union of one man and one woman in marriage.” The problem for the bishops
in Maryland and beyond is that most Catholics are on the other side of
the issue.

Running the latest numbers from the General Social Survey, Darren Sherkat finds
that American Catholics now support SSM by a margin of 47 percent to 35
percent. This margin is twice that in the country as a whole, which for
the first time in 2010 tilted in favor of SSM. No wonder that leading Republicans did not go nuts
when President Obama abandoned his defense of the constitutionality of
the Defense of Marriage Act last week. They know when a wedge has lost
its edge.

It’s all well and good for the National Association of Evangelicals to keep the anti-SSM faith. Evangelicals are by far the religious community most wedded to traditional marriage–possibly because their marriages end so much more frequently in divorce. But with their own rank and file off the reservation, what are poor Catholic prelates to do?

Presumably,
as with contraception and liberalized divorce, they will subside into
silence, or at any rate political quiescence. Here in Connecticut, where
SSM is ensconced beyond dislodging, even the excitable Bishop Lori
doesn’t waste his breath about how it is bringing civilization as we
know it to an end in the Land of Steady Habits.

That said, it
might be prudent for the church’s powers to give some real thought to
establishing a principled difference between the social policy of the
church and the social policy of a pluralistic society. I’m not a fan of
the doctrine of Scandal, but it really does drag the hierarchy into
disrepute when its views diverge widely from the consensus fidelium.
At any rate, it’s more likely that the laity will accept the church’s
views of marriage if they don’t think it wants to impose them on society
at large.