The number of weddings celebrated in American Catholic churches has dropped by 60% in the past generation, at a time when the overall Catholic population was growing by almost 17 million.
A study by Mark Gray for Our Sunday Visitor (OSV) finds that the number of Catholics choosing to marry in the Church has plummeted dramatically. Gray finds “a shift from 8.6 marriages per 1,000 U.S. Catholics in 1972 to 2.6 marriages per 1,000 Catholics in 2010.”
An OSV editorial refers to the decline in Catholic marriages as “another fidelity crisis,” with implications comparable to those of the sex-abuse crisis. “Many Catholics seem unaware of what the Church means by a sacramental marriage, of its opportunities for grace and its advantages over civil marriage,” the editors argue. They conclude that a proper response will require, as a first step, recognizing that this is “a true Church crisis.”
Read the full story in Our Sunday Visitor
You also might want to check out marriage statistics from the U.S. Bishops website.
Friday, June 17, 2011
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2 comments:
I'm not surprised by this statistic at all. When my husband and I were married he was not allowed to receive communion even though he believed it to be the body and blood of Christ as he was not a Catholic yet. However, many of his family were able to recieve the Eucharist and no one told them. There appears to be many loopholes that exist today about when and where and how a Catholic can be married in a church. You can have another minister marry you as long as it is in a Catholic Chruch. Being married today, takes a great deal of give and take, mainly taking what the other dishes out at times. After 25 years, I still take what is given out to me and accept it as part of the good and bad times during a marriage. Committment is the answer and today's married couple's do not take this seriously. That is the reason they don't get married int he church because of the seriousness of the church's committment to the sacrament of marriage.
This aricle says it all. Have we not done this to ourselves? An example would be a married couple for several years have children from that marriage and get divorced. They are permitted to have an annullment through the church as if the marraige and children never happened. It would seem to me that the Catholic church needs to reconsider all of the anullments and offer marriage counseling instead. After all the vows two people make are forever. They picked their mates not the church.Vows mean nothing today even to our religious.
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