I appreciate all the advice and prayers. I’m continuing to pray on the subject and I’m going to sit down with my girlfriend and seriously discuss the issues at hand. I’m also going to talk to my priest at my home church about the subject.
I truly believe God has brought my girlfriend into my life for a reason (whether it be marriage or not) but, I don’t want to commit to her forever if I’m already seeing signs of doubt.
Again, thank you all for your prayers and responses.
-Patrick
I’ve actually dated a guy like your girlfriend, although he was a great deal more fond of the Catholic Church than she seems to be. I actually tried the Mass-plus-Your-Church thing for quite some time, too. Like you would be doing, I attended Mass alone, then also attended the worship service at his church.
You’d probably better at least try that for a good long time before you sign up for it. I found that there is an inherent duplicity in it–this, even though I was open about attending both places. A person attending two different churches each Sunday can hardly help making comparisons, noticing what is absent where…and there you are, the one person who sees it all from on high. That’s not a good place to spend a lot of time. As C.S. Lewis put it, it makes you into a judge, when you ought to be a pupil. Even if you can navigate it OK, it isn’t a great position in which to place your children. Also consider that you open yourself to the temptation to apostasy by even trying this experiment. Been there, done that, too. God was merciful to me, but not everyone finds their way back. That is a danger *well *worth avoiding! So don’t feel a need to try the experiment unless you have already determined to use this arrangement when married, anyway.
Besides that danger, both parishes and non-denominational congregations rightly expect a participation as full as your state in life allows. Being split between two sabotages that relationship, particularly if your theology is so different. No offense to him, but it would have been a mistake to marry the friend for whom I carried out this experiment.
Very nice people, learned a lot for them, but I wouldn’t advocate for it. I wouldn’t do it again. I’m also married to a non-Catholic Christian, BTW. He did not have much catechesis as a child, and was ready to let our kids be raised Catholic.
Let your girlfriend find someone who will help her to raise her children according to her understanding, and find yourself a wife who will raise your children Catholic, rather than having a spouse who is not even open to the possibility of becoming Catholic, let alone the prospect of having your children raised to be solely Catholic.
IOW, better not to leap, but if you are resolved to leap, at least do a lot of looking first.
