Church Accepts Cohabitation

Living together before marriage no longer means you cannot get married in the Roman Catholic Church.

Recognizing that many Catholics live together before getting married, the church is adopting new guidelines saying that cohabiting couples are eligible for a church wedding, if they want one.

Chastity before marriage is still the moral ideal in the Catholic Church. But rather than throw the moral rulebook at couples who live together out of wedlock, the church wants to evangelize them - and help them create lasting Christian marriages.

“If you tick people off by saying only ‘Thou shall not do this’ and ‘Thou shall not do that,’ you will drive them away from church, and that, we know, increases the chances that their marriage eventually will fail,” said Victoria Laskowski, director of Family Ministries for the Diocese of Harrisburg in Pennsylvania, which is among dozens of dioceses nationwide revamping its rules.

In 1980, there were about 1.6 million unmarried couples living together nationwide. That number rocketed to 3.7 million by 1995, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Today, about half of all engaged couples seeking a Catholic wedding are already living together, Laskowski estimated. She recently surveyed the nation’s 175 Roman Catholic dioceses, asking how they address cohabitation in their marriage preparation guidelines. Sixty responded, and more than a third of those have relatively new policies taking a “pastoral” rather than a “legalistic” approach to cohabitation, she said.

“This is going to snowball now, and pretty much every diocese is going to come up with a guideline on this because our numbers of engaged Catholics who are already living together are so high,” Laskowski said. “It’s close to 50 percent, and that doesn’t even account for the ones sleeping together who aren’t living together.”

Rick McCord, associate director of the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C., said the new cohabitation guidelines are “a good trend.”

“It brings the issue out on the table and gives people a way to work with it,” he said.

“The church,” McCord said, “needs to find a balance between its role as a teacher and upholder of moral standards drawn from the gospel, and, at the same time, being a pastor, being a place to which people come not because they are perfect but because they are attempting to lead better lives.”