From the National Catholic Register
By Jennifer Fulwiler
|The other day I was chatting with someone who works at our church, and she mentioned that couples who get married there are well versed in the fullness of the Church’s wisdom on marriage and human sexuality. Engaged couples are required to take a full Natural Family Planning course (not just an intro class), and they also must take a class on the Theology of the Body, so that they can understand why the Church teaches what it does. Though I’m not naive enough to think that every single couple who goes through the system is going to immediately throw out their birth control pills, the quality of the marriage preparation process undoubtedly leads a lot of them to at least remain open to the Church’s teaching in this area. Though some may initially grumble about the extensiveness of the process, I’ve heard that many couples end up being extremely grateful that they were given such thorough practical and theoretical information to get their marriages off to the right start.
After thinking about this for a moment, I had a delayed reaction. I asked: “Wait, how do you get all these couples to agree to do this?” Given the current cultural climate regarding marriage, I was surprised that more couples didn’t decide to get married in a different …