Marriage. A journey with the person you love, giving yourself freely, without reservation, in a life giving relationship for the rest of your lives. A marital relationship is the essence of what a family is based on, and a family is the building block of society.
Professional development. The acquisition of skills and knowledge, for personal development and advancement.
When we are going to do something in our lives we typically invest in it. When endeavoring improvement in our careers we seek tertiary qualifications and professional development. When we want to do a hobby well, we seek a course or lessons. So why not undertake a bit of professional development for our marriages?
Marriage is apparently the hardest vocation, yet a priest gets at least seven years in the seminary before being ordained. People spend on average between 120 and 200 hours planning a wedding. And that is just the logistics for the day.
After marriage preparation it is easy to forget the need for ‘professional development’ every now and then, to reinvest in our marriages, especially when the road is rocky, which naturally happens in various seasons of life – times of illness, pregnancy, childbirth, career ups and downs and other hard times.
Pope Francis recently spoke of this: “The hardship of the journey causes them to experience interior weariness; they lose the flavour of matrimony and they cease to draw water from the well of the Sacrament. Daily life becomes burdensome, and often, even “nauseating”.”
The Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops started in Rome this Monday, and will run for two weeks. It’s theme is “The Pastoral Challenges of the Family in the Context of Evangelisation”.
Prior to the Synod, when talking about the Church’s teaching on divorce, German Cardinal Walter Brandmüller said, “If there is a marriage between a man and a woman, baptized Christian, which was valid and consummated, it is indissoluble. Only death can part them.” If this is the case, then positive messages about marriage and good quality, ongoing formation for engaged and married couples is essential to support this sacrament and vocation.
As marriage progresses it can be easy to drift away from each other with all that goes on with finances, career and family. In marriage we don’t want to be simply sharing the same bed or house, we need more than that. We need to be well formed in what the Church teaches and how to live it out in our daily lives. We need opportunities to learn practical ways of growing in our vocation, especially the hard parts – giving of ourselves to the other. We need good communication skills, ways of treating marriage, foundations for intimacy and knowledge of good ways to give and receive from the other in order to experience the richness and fruits of marriage and true love.
The Synod needs to address this in order to fulfill what Cardinal Brandmüller says is his aim for the Synod: that “faithful Catholics may deepen their faith and the life of sacraments after the synod’s conclusions have been put into practice.”
How will the church invest in marriage and family? How can they do better to support what seems to be failing now? Our Catholic families seem to be doing no better than their secular counterparts.
This investment will develop and advance marriage, and the base of the family, particularly at a time when much about marriage and family is uncertain in our modern age. Its worth it.
5 thoughts on “Marriage Formation: Synod Priority?”
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The church already invest most of their resources into marriage. But the problem is by then the marriages are already poorly made and formed.
Instead the church should start with marriage formation BEFORE young adults are even courting. They date with the wrong intentions and for the wrong reasons and then marry with malformed ideas about marriage. The church, including and especially lay people shouldn’t just expect marriage to happen.
We keep telling young adults, especially young women, to just keep God first and marriage will happen on God’s time. They end up waiting way longer than their secular peers and end up marrying the first person who gives them the time of day Catholic or not.
If the Church really want to improve marriage it needs to give support to those who’ve yet to marry.
Everything Ladasha said.
Likewise, all the focus in current documents on “preparing children within the Domestic Church for marriage” just punts the problem twenty years down the line into the future and lets this generation — the one hit by changing economic and social conditions and the death of parish life — hang in the wind. That everything spoken of of late on unmarried persons by both the Synod and its critics alike presupposed that those persons would already be in couples speaks to the tone-deafness not only of the busy clerical community but more directly of the larger married community that chooses not to see us (or just directs us to the panacea of Internet Dating — remember when the faithful denounced that only a few years back?).
Marriage formation is not separate from formation in lay Catholic life, but it does require some additional tools (especially with so much of this young generation coming from broken or dysfunctional families). The Church has gotten entirely out of the Agape business since it assumes that you’re either marrying young and focusing on your own “Domestic Church” or else are just fodder for pressuring into religious life or grunt work around the parish. I shouldn’t have my head down on the steering wheel before walking into a mass at which I’m lectoring simply because I know the jokes that I’ll hear just behind my back from the couples who refuse to talk to me despite being front and center — and then doing it all again the next morning.
BTW, I wish that men even got *that* much “good news.” If we don’t agree right off the bat to become priests when we aren’t married right out of college, we’re written off as dangerous at best and the Church works hard to steer young women away from us — not believing that anyone not currently listed in the Lives of the Saints could keep chastity without a supernatural vow. It’s deeply painful to realize how the parish is actually working directly *against* young men’s attempts at marriage, then watching as homilies and the Internet explode with complaints about young men leaving the Church (“something, something, pornography” is usually how it goes). Luckily, the same cycle of childhood abuse and trauma that never taught me how to form a relationship with another human being makes me take a hit from authority figures REALLY well, so I keep showing up to Mass every day to be accused of preying on women instead of praying to God (because I’m a single man under 40)…
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