And the case of my friends, they weren’t. The parish in question is apparently very well-known in traditionalist type Latin Mass circles. My friend’s fiance was sort of into that stuff for a while but they got over it quickly after they were nastily denied marriage. Both are Protestants now and have a young child. I actually didn’t think that this was an issue until my friends were denied marriage in the Church. Apparently, it does happen and people do have issues with it. Here is something that I found after Pope Francis married the co-habitating couples in September. Do you think that Francis would approve of this pastor’s tone?
stj-church.com/Weddingguidelines/The%20Cohabiting%20Couple.pdf
Lord is this like my mother arguing that I should be grateful and eat my veggies because of the starving children in African? We live in the U.S., not the Global South and no pastor should demand such hardships on anyone because they still live in the 1950s and have vapors over the fact that some couples aren’t virgins when they marry.
Because it is inconvenient for the couple. Are they supposed to maintain separate apartments and live apart after marriage for a year?
I’ve never had a lease that allows someone to “break it” early without being culpable for the full twelve months rent. It is also quite impossible to sublet. I tried doing so when I was studying abroad for a semester and the only hit I got for “sublet” was an African scam artist. I ended up paying for an apartment I wasn’t using.
The example set by Pope Francis is that you marry co-habitating couples without demanding any extra of them. Period. The Church should be happy that people actually want Church weddings and shouldn’t scare them away by demanding perfection. I can tell you that my friends went to a Protestant church that was happy to marry them and are no longer Catholic. So I guess that we can congratulate the priest on making two ex-Catholics.
