Getting married if a couple have already had sex. Wearing white if the woman is not a virgin

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I still need to get to Paisley Park one of these days. I turned down a chance to just go hang out there back in the early 2000’s
 
phil19034 said:
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EmilyAlexandra:
This is what she says:
  1. If a couple have already had sex, there is no point in getting married. Basically, the only reason for getting married is so that you can have sex in its only proper context, namely, marriage. Therefore, if you have already had sex, there is no point in getting married.
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Wrong. A Catholic couple engaging in fornatication should get married so they can stop fornicating and have a sacramental marriage (assuming they are truly right for one another)
  1. The above applies to civil marriage. With regard to religious marriage, not only is there no point in getting married, but the couple should actually not be allowed to get married. It “disgraces” the church when fornicators marry.
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Nope. See my answer above.
  1. A woman should not be allowed to wear white if she is not a virgin. Wearing white is a privilege reserved for virgins. If a woman is not a virgin on her wedding day, she should wear a coloured dress. Since wearing white is the norm in our culture, coloured wedding dresses would effectively advertise when the bride is not a virgin.
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This was NEVER a religious “rule,” it was a custom of society. Today, the wedding dress (for most of society) doesn’t represent virginity. Very few people see the white as being a sign of virginity today. If it is symbolic of anything for people today, it is symbolic of motherhood.

After all, that’s what “matrimony” means. It comes from the Latin and means (roughly) “to make into a mother”
From my understanding of Christianity in general, and some knowledge of Catholicism specifically, I am imagining (hoping?) that people would say the following:
  1. There are plenty of reasons why a couple would want to get married. Some are purely practical considerations, e.g. the right to inherit property, the right to a pension, and the right to be recognised as next of kin. For most people, marriage is also seen as an added level of commitment imposing specific obligations, such as sticking with each other through thick and thin and being faithful until death. For many Christians, marriage is also considered to be a sacrament.
  2. and 3. Jesus was always talking about forgiving people, not judging, and letting him who is without sin cast the first stone. I cannot believe that Jesus would want people to be made to suffer for the rest of their lives on account of committing a sin, and nor can I believe that he would want somebody to be effectively subjected to a ritual humiliation on what is supposed to be one of the happiest days of her life.
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All I’m going to say is that your mother’s views on this are not in line with the Catholic Church, nor are they in line with most of Christianity.
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This

No offense to the OP or to the OP’s mom, but these are whack a doodle ideas.
 
Your mother’s thoughts are erratic, odd, and make no sense theologically.

She certainly isn’t representing what the Catholic Church teaches about the sacrament of matrimony.

Also, women can’t “consider becoming a nun,” who aren’t Catholic. We don’t allow people to seek Sacred Orders nor Consecrated Life that are neophytes. Many years in the Church are needed beforehand, and, these kinds of thoughts and opinions wouldn’t get her into any religious Order.

The color of dress doesn’t mean anything, and being a virgin is only a requirement for someone who is becoming a Consecrated Virgin. Every other vocation (including Sacred Orders, Consecrated Life, and Matrimony) are all possible for people who are not virgins.

Be at peace,
Deacon Christopher
 
brown_bear said:
But afterwards it is not that we said: «So, from today stop living together and breaking the sixth commandment, otherwise no marriage».
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Yes, I know a couple who were living together when they went through their marriage preparation to get married in the Catholic Church. That was pretty much their experience. The people running the course accepted that many couples were already living together. They were told that if they were already having sex, they should stop until the wedding, but there was no way that that could be enforced: it was just something they were asked to do.
Tis_Bearself said:
I don’t know where your mother is coming from with all this, or what religion she practices.
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Oh, I think it’s her own idiosyncratic amalgam of Low Church Anglicanism, different branches of Protestant non-conformism (Methodist, Baptist, Salvationist), and Catholic mysticism. She doesn’t really practise any religion these days, but I think she still holds on to bits and pieces of the moral teachings of different denominations. It’s all quite contradictory. For example, she has this extreme aversion to premarital sex for heterosexual couples that goes way beyond anything that Christianity actually teaches, but she has absolutely no problem with homosexuality.
Tis_Bearself said:
As for women being “allowed” to wear white, it’s none of your mother’s or anyone else’s business whether the bride is a virgin
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Well, I agree, but she doesn’t seem to. I’ve moved on a long way, but I still can’t 100% forgive her for the way she tried her best to spoil my own wedding, dropping in these comments like, “If you’re already sleeping together, which I know you are, I don’t understand why you’re getting married”, or pointedly asking, “Will you wear white?”, followed up with, “Well, it seems that anything goes these days.” When a family friend got married after living with her boyfriend for some time, she commented, “Better to live in sin that to disgrace the church with your fornication!”, which I took to be thinly veiled attack on me. When she found out that some friends of mine (one of whom is a Catholic) had been living together before they got married, she said, “I thought they had been honourable in their courtship”, adding, “I thought she was a holy woman”.
Tis_Bearself said:
It’s so rude and far “out there” that I don’t even see a point in having a discussion about it.
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I guess because I have had to put up with it for so long. Every time she hears about somebody getting married it seems to be an opportunity for her to pass judgement. It is genuinely reassuring to know that people think that it’s ridiculous.
 
blackforest said:
I’m curious how we should make grooms display their premarital sexual shame?
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I think the way my mother sees it is that, notwithstanding the comments about the white wedding dress being an invention of Queen Victoria, the white wedding dress is a way of the bride advertising her virginity, so if she is not a virgin, it is dishonest for her to wear white. The groom wears no distinctive clothing with any symbolic significance, so can wear what he likes without fear of being called a hypocrite.
phil19034 said:
nor are they in line with most of Christianity.
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No, I think she makes up her own rules as she goes along, but seems to believe that they have some basis in some version of Christianity.
Sarcelle said:
No offense to the OP or to the OP’s mom, but these are whack a doodle ideas.
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I would agree.
Diaconia said:
Also, women can’t “consider becoming a nun,” who aren’t Catholic. We don’t allow people to seek Sacred Orders nor Consecrated Life that are neophytes. Many years in the Church are needed beforehand, and, these kinds of thoughts and opinions wouldn’t get her into any religious Order.
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Well, I am not sure whether she was necessarily considering becoming a Catholic nun. She may have been considering becoming an Anglican nun. I’m not sure.

I would agree. There are many benefits to marriage that are not purely religious in nature, both to the people getting married, to their children, and to wider society.
 
EmilyAlexandra said:
I think the way my mother sees it is that, notwithstanding the comments about the white wedding dress being an invention of Queen Victoria, the white wedding dress is a way of the bride advertising her virginity, so if she is not a virgin, it is dishonest for her to wear white. The groom wears no distinctive clothing with any symbolic significance, so can wear what he likes without fear of being called a hypocrite.
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I get it. I just enjoy calling out a repugnant cultural double standard that needs to die a timely death. 🙂
 
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EmilyAlexandra said:
but I had a 10% fear that people would come back saying that she has a fair point and there should be some kind of retribution and humiliation for impure women and couples without honour.
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???

I don’t understand this at all.
 
The Sacrament of Reconciliation also prevents people from being burnt.
 
1ke said:
???

I don’t understand this at all.
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Really? The Catholic Church has a reputation for treating “fallen women” badly, e.g. the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland. The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights continues to defend the laundries, describing the inmates as “delinquent Irish women” and claiming that many of them were prostitutes.

Furthermore, it is not as if CAF does not have its share of misogynists posting from time to time. Some of the stuff posted here is frankly baffling, e.g.: “… I believe women are not supposed to struggle with those types of sins and so maybe there could be some underlying causes to those desires.”

Perhaps you “don’t understand this at all” because you are an intelligent and well informed person who possesses a deep understanding of Catholicism, and thus you expect all Catholics to be similarly intelligent and well informed about their faith.
 
Every person who is baptized receives a white garment. It is one of the great prophecies of forgiveness: “ though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” Isaiah 1:18 It continued in modern liturgy, where a white alb is the first garment, worn to recall our baptism.

I suspect this had something to do with the connection between white and virginity, but they forgot the context along the way. Whatever sins you have committed have been forgiven. If you confess before your wedding, any sin has been forgiven and you can wear white as the sign of being a Christian and as a sign of being forgiven for all your sins. And you should confess before a wedding so that you can display the greatness of the Lord who blesses your union and makes it into a sign of God’s love for us. (it is a generic you, not aimed at the person I am addressing)

“ they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. “ Rev 7:14
 
Wearing white for a wedding is not a universal custom. In the past, a woman would wear a dress of whatever color she wanted for her wedding and afterwards it would become her “good dress” the one she wore to visit and go to church in. My paternal grandmother told me her wedding dress was brown, my maternal grandmother’s wedding dress was navy and if you read the Little House books, when Laura Ingalls Wilder married, her dress was black.
 
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