Addressing four of the most important problems that affect devout Catholics when it comes to getting to know a potential spouse and considering marriage.
(Photo: Josh Applegate | Unsplash.com)
In Part One of this essay, I noted that marriage rates have declined in recent decades, including among Catholics, and that there are countless reasons for this trend. While many Catholics have been impacted by the sexual revolution, others live according to Church teaching, yet still encounter enormous obstacles to marriage.
I then drew attention to four problems that affect devout Catholics in particular, based on both research and informal observations: dysfunctional discernment, divisions in the Church or “Catholic camps,” poor examples and mixed messages from parents and mentors, and lack of universal courtship (or dating) customs.
Providing full solutions to these problems would take much more research and explanation than I am capable of here—not least because I am still unmarried myself (i.e. a blind person attempting to lead the blind). But how can I claim something is wrong unless I can at least vaguely sketch what “right” might look like? Here, I will offer a few suggestions to parents and mentors, as well as single Catholics themselves, to start mitigating the problems I described in my previous essay.
One note before I begin: whenever I say “courtship,” I mean the entire process of getting to know a potential spouse and considering marriage. I use “dating” to mean going on dates: that is, going on a fun outing with a person of the opposite sex in order to get to know him or her better. The terms are nearly interchangeable.
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