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Wedding-bell blues
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Even in the Catholic Church, the number of sacramental weddings is declining. Couples are marrying more non-Catholics, avoiding church weddings or simply choosing to live together instead.
Cohabitation is now so common as to barely raise an eyebrow, and when cohabiting couples are challenged by a priest during wedding preparation, they often respond with surprise, even anger. Yet cohabitation is one of the biggest indicators of whether a marriage will last.
Indeed, a growing trend is for engaged couples to buy a house together before getting married. During the engagement period, when a couple should be making sure that they can commit to a lifetime's worth of good times and bad times, sickness and health, they are instead assuming a massive, joint debt and shopping for mortgages.
Yet even among cohabiting couples who have been "playing house" for years, the wedding day has assumed an outsized importance. Think of it: A couple may have a house, furnishings, sexual relations, even a child. Even as the notion of a sacramental marriage is diminishing - sure to keep annulment courts busy for years to come - the notion of the wedding as some sort of super party and rite of passage is growing.
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Why this is happening is open to debate. Certainly it is a symptom of an increasingly materialistic culture, but also a culture that hungers for ritual. Weddings are big business, and couples and their parents can incur significant debt for this one-day party, and that in turn has engendered a huge marketing apparatus that is selling a "memory."
The church has not stood idly by as the culture has hijacked the wedding day. For starters, the church is going to increasingly great lengths to remind couples that the wedding is only a day, while marriage is for a lifetime.
Preparation classes are now the norm, even if uneven in quality. Psychological assessments are sometimes used to identify likely problems (differing attitudes toward money or religion or children, for example). Most couples are asked to wait a certain period of time before the wedding day.
Cohabiting couples are increasingly likely to be challenged, even if many priests feel that they have little in the way of leverage.
The U.S. bishops, in their recent document "Married Love and the Gift of Life," stress the profound commitment and significance of Christian marriage: "Marriage is more than a civil contract; it is a lifelong covenant of love between a man and a woman. It is an intimate partnership in which husbands and wives learn to give and receive love unselfishly, and then teach their children to do so as well. Christian marriage in particular is a 'great mystery,' a sign of the love between Christ and his church."
The idea of marriage as the incubator of unselfish Christian love is often forgotten in the rush to party. But the church firmly believes that marriage is a vocation, and that is the responsibility of each spouse to help the other grow in sanctity.
Now that is language that is unlikely to be found in the average bridal magazine, yet it is the reason that the church cares so much about the commitment that the engaged couple is making.
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