Half a century before today’s battles over marriage and family reached their current intensity, one Catholic writer had already identified the fault lines with remarkable clarity. Earlier than most, Ida Friederike Görres saw that the question of marriage was becoming the decisive cultural battleground of the modern age.
Writing in the final years of her life, the German Catholic intellectual confronted a transformation that had only just begun to gather momentum. The sexual revolution was reshaping western society, and its assumptions were already beginning to filter into theological debates within the Church itself. In What Binds Marriage Forever, published in 1971 shortly before her death, Görres offered a strikingly lucid defence of the indissolubility of marriage – and a diagnosis of the deeper anthropological crisis beneath the cultural upheaval.
