If Catholic is truly the country’s largest religious tradition, where are they all?
A Mass will leave your spouse out of half of the wedding. Plus if the guests are not majority Catholic, it leaves all of them out as well. Not the best way to start a marriage.
My son got engaged to a very sweet Protestant girl. When she found out that they could not have a Mass because she was not Catholic she began taking lessons. She became Catholic a couple of months before the wedding.
"finding meaning" means that people are making their own rules about life, religion and God." That doesn't lead to God's path.
Pope Benedict said it best: "When policies do not presume or promote objective values, the resulting moral relativism tends instead to produce frustration, despair, selfishness and a disregard for the life and liberty of others."
(I am in this business, so I know what I am talking about)
It used to be that if you were a church member, the church was free or nearly free to use for your ceremony. But those days are long gone.
Here on the east cost, a wedding at City Hall will probably cost a few hundred bucks. The celebration can be handled by going out to dinner with very close family and friends. Or a couple can announce they're going to Jamaica to marry and only very close friends and family will come and it will save the couple thousands and thousands of dollars.
What can't be done for professional couples is to announce they're getting married in six months at the church up the street and none of their office mates, drinking buddies, or non-immediate relatives are invited. That's social and career suicide. Having hot roast beef and a keg of beer at the local VFW is embarrassing and potentially harmful to their careers.
Couples - particularly those burdened with student loans - can't afford all that a church wedding brings with it. It's largely due to being a)local and b) announced six months in advance.
....If there are so many American Catholics, why aren't they getting married?
There's a whole lot of assumptions crammed into that one word "if"....
"....studies of the 2004 results identified a new hardcore vote of roughly 16 percent of Catholics (nearly 10 million people) who attend church more than once a week and identify as ideologically “conservative”. George Bush targetted these people and increased his percentage of the conservative Catholic vote...."
-- from the thread America's conservative Catholics are on the warpath. Republicans should be courting them.
...let me once again share the four-pronged typology that a veteran priest here in Washington, D.C., gave me a few years ago. There are, he said, four kinds of Catholics in this country and, thus, four “Catholic votes” on almost any issue. Any news report that lumps these groups together isn’t worth very much.Related threads:* Ex-Catholics. Solid for the Democrats. Cultural conservatives have no chance.
* Cultural Catholics who may go to church a few times a year. This may be one of those all-important “undecided voters” depending on what’s happening with the economy, foreign policy, etc. Leans to Democrats.
* Sunday-morning American Catholics. This voter is a regular in the pew and may even play some leadership role in the parish. This is the Catholic voter that is really up for grabs, the true swing voter that the candidates are after.
* The “sweats the details” Roman Catholic who goes to confession. Is active in the full sacramental life of the parish and almost always backs the Vatican, when it comes to matters of faith and practice. This is a very small slice of the American Catholic pie.
-- From the thread Those consistently complex “Catholic voters”
Faith of Our Fathers ping