Course

[lostcarpark]

Tomorrow we have our Pre-Marriage course*. Wish us luck!

In this country, you have to do a course before you can get married by the Catholic church.

Comments

[missfairchild.livejournal.com]

Oh, crikey. I remember Mark McCann's article on this (Green Babies For Go) with painful clarity some eight years after he wrote it. The man's a genius, he should write more.

Good luck. Try to keep your faces straight during the funny bits, and give us a full report when you get back!

[crazysoph.livejournal.com]

Actually, even though I'm not a Catholic, where I lived at the time had a helpful priest at the local church, who gave a lot of the course materials for the marriage guidence to me and the then-proto dear_hubby - we skipped over the explicitly religious stuff, except (oddly enough) for the "mixed marriages" items, some of which were rather useful in our mixed-nationalities/cultures marriage, rather than mixed religions. We got some unintended giggles, too, from items which actually made a lot more sense if you'd already experienced living together. But the marriage inventory gave us a good sense of our relationship, and we ended up concluding we were pretty darn good together.

Anyway, good luck, mazel tov and all the rest. I suspect the good wishes are a formality, in the case of yourself and madangie, not that I won't wish them anyway.

Crazy(And what they say about the wedding day being the best day? They're wrong. It gets better...)Soph

[davesangel.livejournal.com]

Best of luck! One of our old neighbours was (still is, I think) one of the poeple who runs the pre-marriage courses - very strict Catholic. I remember him asking my dad one day how long me and digignome had been going out together and were we planning on getting married one day (obviously saw us as potential candidates for his course). Thankfully my dad made some excuse about dinner being ready and left :D

[lostcarpark.livejournal.com]

You'll just have to tell him that you're dying to get married, but you really want to go to Rome and get married by the Pope, so you'll have to wait till you can afford it.

[wyvernfriend.livejournal.com]

we couldn't get a course to suit us, so we got away without doing it. Keep wondering if it would be worthwhile.

[jamesb.livejournal.com]

Best of Luck

James

[terrysgirl333.livejournal.com]

No, it's NOT mandatory. The priest has a duty to make sure that you both know what you are doing and realise the seriousness of the sacrement you are taking. The easiest way for them to do it is to get the piece of paper that says you completed the pre-marriage course. While the priest may require it, it is in no way mandatory. (discovered this when doing our own pre-marriage course 7 years ago) However, the course is no bad thing in itself, it seems to depend HUGELY on who's running it.

Best of luck, and enjoy the course!

[lostcarpark.livejournal.com]

It wasn't too bad (I'll post a separate report).

I didn't realise it wasn't mandatory, though I suspect we'd have a hard job convincing a priest we didn't need it, given that we've known each other a relatively short time. Of the ten couples on the course, our wedding was the soonest, and we've been together the shortest.

The important thing is that we feel ready, though.

[terrysgirl333.livejournal.com]

Go on post an update. I'd love to hear how you get on. BTW, AFAIK, the catholic church in the USofA also encourage you take a course before marriage called the pre-cana course.

[purple-peril.livejournal.com]

I read this and thought, how bizarre! But on the other hand maybe it's a good idea to have people work through and think about the commitment they are about to make, and its implications.
What worries me, though, is that it's maybe a bit late... I mean, it would be rather awkward to get half way through the course and then say, erm, actually I don't think this marriage thing is for me... :)