So, you really don’t have a religion, per se, and your girlfriend is Catholic. Parents aside, that is already a difficult position.
Did you know that your girlfriend, if she takes her faith seriously as a practicing Catholic would be expected to …marry in the Church. Even in cases where she’d marry someone outside the faith, in order to marry in the Church, that person would need to agree to allow any children from the marriage to be raised Catholic.
Are you baptized? If it’s a valid baptism, it’s one thing. Catholics really are encouraged to marry other Catholics. They are really not supposed to marry unbaptized people.
Now, you may be thinking, “That’s not right. That’s not fair”. Well, it’s my experience, and many others, that when people of 2 different faiths marry and are not on the “same page” on most important matters, like faith and God, maybe not this moment, but in the future, it can, and probably will, become an issue.
It typically becomes an issue with children.
So, in the best case scenario which would be that you agree to all this, allow her to raise your future children in the faith. Where does that leave you? So, every weekend, she will go to church by herself. With kids, she will go, with the kids, without you.
One day, kids will probably see how you stay in Sundays, sleep late, while they may get up early, go to mass. They will probably say, “Hey, why do I need to go to Church? Dad doesn’t!” Other child pipes in “Yeah, and I don’t want to go, either”. We consider Church important, but like going to the doctor, going to school, although necessary, we believe, particularly when young, we may resist. Would you back her up, then? Although, even if you did, your example would speak volumes.
Now, contraception is against the Church. You would be expected to abstain till marriage, as well. Your wife may ask you to use Natural Family Planning instead of contraception, means generally 1 week out of every month, during her fertile time, you both would need to abstain.
Catholics don’t believe in contraception, masturbation, abortion, so-called “same-sex marriage”, euthanasia, or divorce. We are not to condone these things. She is really not supposed to go to other churches, except for a wedding or funeral, maybe.
She’s really to live her faith, go to confession to a priest, receive the sacraments.
She may want to have religious articles at the house…rosary, crucifix on the way, religious pictures, statues, even of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
We Catholics believe there is one absolute truth and don’t believe in things like moral relativism. We don’t believe everything is true. We look to faiths. One will say reincarnation is true. Another will say it’s not. We say to ourselves, “They can’t BOTH be right on that!” We believe ONE is true, that the other is not. We believe the Catholic Church is the one true Church and that it is actually the ONLY Church established by Christ. Well, that’s at least what I believe.
Churches outside that, we believe have excommunicated themselves through “schism”, placing themselves outside possibly their only means of salvation. Quite frankly, we consider your belief you just mentioned to be something of what I guess we’d call “heresies”, that if you don’t convert, you are risking hell.
We obey the pope, archbishops, priests, religious. We believe in the magisterium…structure, institution of the Church. We believe them to be God’s representatives on earth, to disobey them would be equivalent to disobeying Christ and God.
Will you ever be able to pray with her? Especially during tough times, we Catholics look to God, but we should really all be reading our Bibles, praying, daily.
One last thing, Catholics, before marriage are really supposed to go through marriage preparation, precana. Would you even consider doing that? That would teach you a lot about the faith.
Interfaith marriages can work but typically have a harder time of it. Protestants seemed to have coined a phrase for it when a Christian/Catholic is married to a non-Christian/non-Catholic. They call this situation being “unevenly yoked”, with the Christian doing all the spiritual work in the relationship and the other just coasting. It doesn’t work out well like that.
It’s sort of like trying to move a very heavy desk with one person pushing, other not.
I was once married to an agnostic, and I can only tell you that you also might find that, when you are under stress, you might be tempted to bring up all your differences …her faith…during arguments.
To me, marriage is tough enough without being on different pages on the key issues…God and faith.
I once thought I fell in love with a Protestant, that he was the one. We never got married but have been friends off and on. However now, I am SO gad we did NOT get married. It would have been disastrous! We’ve fought over religion! Imagine what would have happened had we been married!
Religion will probably be an area of tension not only between you, your kids, her, but also her parents! So, I hope you’ll consider all this carefully before you proceed. She also may get a few Catholic friends, on top of that, then, what?
It’s ultimately your decision, but there are a ton of ways not even mentioned here your differences would play out. She would not, or should not, be open to a lot of sexual stuff many couples are into. We believe we are temples of the Holy Spirit, that marriage is sacrament, sacred so treat it as such. We don’t see sex as being for purely recreational purposes, that it’s serious business.
Anyway, hope you’ll think about this carefully, and good luck with whatever you decide. God bless!
