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Pope tells pastors to help people get marriage right

30 Jan 2011 - Preaching the News for Sunday

Members of the “remnant of Israel” shall pasture their flocks peaceably and “shall do no wrong,” this Sunday’s first reading prophesizes. Pope Benedict XVI Saturday, addressing members of the Roman Rota, the Vatican tribunal that presides over marriage annulments, encouraged the church to improve its pastoral counseling to would-be spouses to help them understand the nature of the commitment they are making. The goal is to bring down the number of annulments, which are particularly high in the United States. The pope said the right to a church wedding requires that the bride and groom intend to celebrate and live their marriage truthfully and authentically. "No one can make a claim to the right to a nuptial ceremony," he said. Benedict acknowledged that the problems that would allow for a marriage to be annulled cannot always be identified beforehand. But he said better pre-marriage counseling, which the Catholic Church requires for Catholic weddings, could help avoid a "vicious circle" of invalid marriages. Source: An article by Nicole Winfield for the Associated Press

Divorce Marriage benedict xvi marriage preparation annulments roman rota

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Marriage prep: More important than ever

Short essays about observed trends in Roman Catholic life - Pastoral trends

What are the biggest challenges Catholics experience in the first few years of marriage? Balancing job, family, sex, and finances. These are the conclusions of a comprehensive study in 2000 by the Center for Marriage and Family at Creighton University. Sociologically, expectations for the marital relationship are higher than ever and failure is therefore all the easier. Spouses are simultaneously best friends, contributors to the household’s short- and long-term economic health, and the focus of romance and sexual pleasure. As Catholic couples get married later in life, come from smaller families, enjoy relatively higher levels of educational attainment, and aspire to levels of economic success, older models that sustained marriage preparation become less effective for those all-important first few years of marriage. These trends are often particularly pronounced for non-Hispanic Catholics. Young couples particularly lack a lived experience of effective models of marriage that relate to their own lives and the new types of pressure on their marital relationship. This means that Catholic marriage preparation programs, still among the most important such programs within American religion in general, are in need of a rethinking. The most essential preparation for Catholic couples today is to learn how to balance their expectation of job, family, sex, and finances before they marry, and to know that these concerns will be central to whether their marriage succeeds or fails. And it is within the context of marriage preparation that they will see how their faith relates to their marital relationship and their expectations and aspirations. © 2004, Bryan Froehle.

Authors Bryan Froehle

marriage preparation marital relationships

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Word of the Week

17 November 2024

Presider’s Chair

\'pri-sīd-ərs 'cher\

Also known as the presidential chair, the seat in a parish church from which the celebrant leads the assembly during Mass. Its meaning derives from the chair, or cathedra in Latin, from which the diocesan bishop presides (from Latin meaning “to protect” or literally “to sit before”). The chair is a liturgical symbol of authority and pastoral leadership.

Pronunciation Read more

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