Catholic friends living with opposite gender

[Jerok]

I have two situations I am wondering about. I go to a Catholic college, some people live off campus in renting houses.

1. A guy is living in a house with other guys, and his girlfriend moved back to the town, and while she’s looking for a place she’s staying in a spare room in the house. He says it’s just temporary and she’s looking for a new place, it’s been about a month or so.
2. There’s a house with 3 guys and 3 girls living in it, no relationship couples. I know at least two personally and are very devout Catholics, I’m sure the others are as well, it seems there’s almost no chance of anything happening between them.

Are these sins against scandal, or cohabitation?

I’m worried for them, and my sponsor is one of the people living in the house with 3 guys and 3 girls, and we recently went over morality in RCIA and it was sort of a wake-up call for her and she is worried now too. I know she’s seeing a priest over this now and trust she’ll make a good decision. What do you guys think?

 

[puzzleannie]

I have two situations I am wondering about. I go to a Catholic college, some people live off campus in renting houses.

1. A guy is living in a house with other guys, and his girlfriend moved back to the town, and while she’s looking for a place she’s staying in a spare room in the house. He says it’s just temporary and she’s looking for a new place, it’s been about a month or so.
2. There’s a house with 3 guys and 3 girls living in it, no relationship couples. I know at least two personally and are very devout Catholics, I’m sure the others are as well, it seems there’s almost no chance of anything happening between them.

Are these sins against scandal, or cohabitation?

I’m worried for them, and my sponsor is one of the people living in the house with 3 guys and 3 girls, and we recently went over morality in RCIA and it was sort of a wake-up call for her and she is worried now too. I know she’s seeing a priest over this now and trust she’ll make a good decision. What do you guys think?

I think we cannot know what is going on in the private lives of our friends (unless they burden us with these revelations), and we do not, in Christian charity, assume anything but the most charitable and generous assumptions about their private lives, no matter what we observe.

If you have some responsibility for someone, like the sponsor, in such a situation yes you may gently remind them, as you have, and leave it to her to ask her priest, as she has. In general unrelated adults living in a boarding-house style situation is not problematic necessarily when each has separate rooms and shares the common living areas.

 

[Ron_Conte]

Living in the same house with someone of the opposite gender, outside of marriage, without a sexual relationship, is not intrinsically evil. So whether or not it is moral would depend on the intention and circumstances. Scandal is a type of circumstance; it is difficult for us to judge whether or not those particular situations might cause scandal. It is for those individuals to make that judgment.

[1 Corinthians]
{9:5} Do we not have the authority to travel around with a woman who is a sister, just as do the other Apostles, and the brothers of the Lord, and Cephas?

The Apostles traveled in a group that includes a number of disciples of Christ, both men and women, some of them chaste and unmarried.