Dory And Pope Francis: Making Waves And Scaring Catholics

For more than 15 years, I’ve worked extensively with divorced men and women to help them find hope and healing and have heard their stories. Many of these people admittedly were not at all prepared for marriage at the time of their wedding. Much to my dismay, many of them have gone on to wed again without due preparation or proper consideration of things they should do differently so as to avoid another disaster, and have ended up divorced again.

But, it’s not just in that section of society that we have a problem. Our dating and engaged couples are generally not well-prepared for marriage. With the legacy of divorce our older generations have passed down, the utter lack of many parents’ support of catechesis for their children, the hook-up culture and wide acceptance of cohabitation, future generations of couples will have a difficult time entering into valid marriages.

There are some real Catholic powerhouse speakers out there who are doing as much as they can to help teenagers and young adults prepare for future marriages, thank goodness, but by-and-large, parents are dropping the ball. We need to take our responsibility for our children’s formation seriously.

Straight From the Horse’s Mouth

There is a wonderful priest, Father Peter, who has facilitated the Three To Get Married pre-cana program in his diocese for many years and has helped hundreds of engaged couples prepare for this very important event in their lives; their wedding day and life together. After each program concludes, he has participants fill out an exit survey so he can collect feedback on the program.

He’s admitted at times that it is a frustrating process. He says that, despite his best efforts to inform these couples of the important issues involved in getting married, a lot of them don’t really seem to care. The majority of the couples, according to Father Peter, state the only reason they attended the program was at the behest of their parents or parish priest so they could be married in the Catholic Church. He states that a common response would be:

We appreciate your efforts but we feel the Church’s attitude toward contraception and co-habitation is outdated and not inline with our lifestyle.

In the end, he knows that all he can do is try his best to impress the sanctity of marriage upon these couples and then let them go their own way. Many of these same couples come back for counseling when their marriages start to fall apart.

We have a crisis in the Church and in our society that will take effort on the part of every Catholic to curb and hopefully reduce. It’s not just a matter of the US Church cranking out annulments willy-nilly as many finger-pointers insist, it is a cancer that is eating away at the very core of the gift that marriage is intended to be. It destroys the beauty of a committed, exclusive, happy relationships.

Pope Francis is not far off the mark, friends, and in my opinion, that is what is really scary.