The Sacrament of Reconciliation in 6 minutes

Just on time to be ready for Christmas!

God on the Back Burner

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By Christian
I received this comment from a cohabiting future groom,
“I don't feel that my commitment in marriage will be any different from the one I made in cohabiting before marriage. From the beginning, I have given all my love to her and her only, and nothing about that is going to change.”
He was very sincere! But what about God? While there is a difference between couples who cohabitate while planning to get married and couples who cohabitate with no plan, cohabitation remains sinful.
When a couple asks for the Sacrament of Matrimony, we assume that they yearn to invite God into their relationship. If they are a cohabiting couple, we assume that they wish to bring their relationship to a higher level.
Most of the time, cohabitation involves sex and contraception, which are two grave sins, despite what the culture tells us. They are not sins because “the Church says so,” they are sins because they go against God’s natural laws and will.

Lovers by Marc Chagall

We cannot overlook the serious pastoral problem presented by the widespread practice of cohabitation, often by couples who seem unaware that it is gravely sinful, not to mention damaging to the stability of society. Pope Benedict XVI to American Bishops, March 9^th, 2012

Cohabitation puts God on the back-burner. A couple who cohabitates before marriage doesn't put God in the equation. In short, they don’t trust God to give them their spouse at just the right time.
It is like saying, "We are so in love, so committed to each other, that we cannot wait for you, God. We don’t need you." When in reality, the very source of their love IS God. He is the source of all love. So to proceed prior to His blessing is like turning our backs on Him. 

Very often, too, these couples do not trust their love either, and think it has to be tested. They want to verify that they can make it together, just as they would test a car to make sure it’s the right kind for them.

Cohabitation is a great scandal in the Church, and causes others to sin, thinking that if so many Catholics are doing it, it must be OK. “If something is evil, even if everybody is doing it, it remains evil. If something is right, even if nobody is doing it, it remains right.” St. Augustine said in his Confessions.
We were celebrating my granddaughter Alice's birthday not long ago and this image came to my mind:
Just imagine that Alice snuck around behind our backs and grabbed a big piece of the beautiful birthday cake with her fingers, just to have a taste. Then the time to celebrate her birthday comes, and all we have to present to the family gathered around her is a cake with a big ugly hole in it. Everybody is shocked. The remainder of the cake is still good, we still celebrate the birthday, but something is spoiled, something is not as good and beautiful as it should have been. It's exactly the same with cohabitation. 

Remaining chaste until after the wedding makes it the only way to do it right in order to honestly include God.
No one can consummate their vows until after their union has been blessed by God, because sex is THE sign of the covenant that authenticates the consent.

 Yes, it’s God will for us to wait until He blesses us. These are the natural laws, the order in which God would like us to choose to abide in order to follow Him and be happy.

Marc Chagall

 

Healing in the Sacrament, Part 1

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By Christine

Sacramental marriage is losing ground. 

Tying the knot

In the last 35 years, the amount of people getting married in a church has dropped 70%, and continues to decline by 5% each year. More and more young couples prefer cohabitation to a church wedding. It seems like marriage is only attractive to homosexuals now!

In our own family, most of our nephews and nieces, and even one of our daughters, have settled for cohabitation. What is their motive? Fear of the life-commitment? Rejection of the Church and institutions in general? Fear of divorce? They can’t even say they want to be different because everybody cohabitates! The ones who are different are the ones who marry.

I want to scream at them that what they reject is exactly what could make them happy; happy beyond anything they could imagine! What they reject is precisely what they long for. They have preconceived ideas about marriage, clichés that are conveyed by our culture. If they only knew what the grace of the Sacrament of Matrimony represents. They’re all enthusiastic about superhero movies, special effects defying all natural laws, magic, and the extraordinary, but they don’t know that the grace of the Sacrament of Matrimony beats them all!

Avengers: http://picsmixer.blogspot.com/2012/05/blog-post_08.html

I feel compelled to write about it, to yell on the rooftops that Christ’s grace is incredibly powerful, efficient in very concrete ways, and the best thing that can ever happen to anyone! I can affirm it because Christian and I experience it daily in our marriage! I want everyone to know that marriage rocks!

Of course, we didn’t know much about marriage either when we said yes on July 2^nd, 1977. We didn’t receive any marriage preparation and had been cohabiting for almost three years. Still, we didn’t think cohabiting could be a permanent solution, and we wanted to seal our love in marriage. We wanted to have children, and we instinctively knew that only a Catholic marriage would give our family the solid foundations it would need.

July 2nd, 1977

Now, 35 years later, we are in awe at what Christ accomplished in our relationship.

We wrote about the day we met on November 27^th, 1974. What we haven’t told you yet, is how broken and wounded we both were, and how we added to our brokenness through our three years of cohabiting. 

Christian and his mother

Me as a girl scout

Christian had lost his mother to cancer just the year before; his girlfriend had aborted their baby without even giving him a choice, a few months later. For me, I was craving to be loved. My year as an exchange student in Indiana had messed my moral and spiritual compass up. Everything I had believed in before Indiana was shaken. 

I had dreamt of giving myself only to the one who would be my husband. I had dreamt of strong Catholic values, and even though the dreams were still deep inside me, my actions had twisted everything upside down. This is who we were when we met: two hurt and lost kids! (to be continued).