‘They lived happily ever after’? Practices of sustaining the durability of Roman Catholic marriage in the context of transformations in intimacy in late modernity

Abstract

Although in late-modern societies the idea of a ‘forever’ relationship has lost its dominant status, it is consistently upheld by the Roman Catholic Church. The aim of the article is to analyse the practices of sustaining the durability of Catholic marriage, which we treat as ways of adapting to the tensions between late-modern models of intimacy and the rule of indissolubility of marriage. We refer to data collected in qualitative research among educated Roman Catholic women in Poland. Using the lived religion approach, we demonstrate how these women sacralise actions within marriage that have been secularised in the late-modern world, while also using late modernity as a reservoir of meanings, leading to hybridisation of religious practices. We argue that sustaining conservative religious rules is often based on actions in which religious aspects are negotiated and transformed. Religion operates ‘non-autonomously’ in these processes, entering a relationship with elements that are originally not religious.