Marriage preparation - Catholic - Help

Hi lovelygirl, it really depends on your priest but think of it as marriage counselling for unmarried couples.

With us our priest is taking a very hands on approach and is taking all of our lessons, which will be 15 hour long sessions in total. We've only had about 3 lessons so far, and although 'Catholic' marriage preparation can sound daunting, there isn't that much focus on Catholicism at the moment. We've dealt with conflict in relationships and how to deal with that as time goes on, and how to reduce the anger etc. Talking about things like forgiveness and jealousy may seem wishy washy, but it is applicable to everyone. It's not a topic we discuss normally so it's interesting to talk it through with each other with an intermediary to help us! To some it may seem very silly, but for me and OH (who isn't Catholic), we're enjoying it a lot, pre marriage counselling has made us think a lot more about what we're comitting to.

You don't need to prepare anything for the lesson, your priest will tell you about the forms that you need to fill out. Our priest gives us homework each time, but that is mainly to discuss with each other something that has been raised in the lesson, so not particularly taxing! One of the things we had to do was to write our vows out on a small piece of card and give it to the other person. We were told to put it in our purses/wallets and have a glimpse at them when we opened them up, and each time think about different parts of our vows and make it a part of our everyday lives. I thought this was a lovely idea and it certainly makes the marriage seem a lot scarier every time you see the words "till death do us part"!

My friends had a different experience. They had their marriage preparation lessons with a married couple who were members of their parish. They went through the normal 'counselling' stuff too and found it useful.

Your priest may decide to have lots of lessons or very few but it's up to him entirely.

Hope that helps a little, don't worry about it.

xx

We were sent on a course split over two Saturday mornings. It was married couples taking ours & it was a complete waste of time.

They did speak about some aspects of marriage - you should listen to each other etc - stuff that is quite obvious really. Most of the time it was one woman talking about how bad abortion & gay 'marriage' is. And that if anyone in the room doesn't agree with every aspect of the catholic churchs views then we shouldn't be getting married in the church.

We walked out at the tea break.

The second class is tomorrow which goes over readings to choose etc but we aren't going. We get married next Saturday, they are all chosen.

Hi Mrs Bear - Thanks for that positive thread, I am non catholic, we seem to have relatively strict parish, as you had to go to church a for a few months before they would consider doing the marriage prep course. Also we can't get married if we do not complete the course..... Although if we don't like father franks marriage prep course we have an alternative of FIL2bs boss Father Michael. It is really complicated when you want to get married out of parish using another parishes deacon(FIL2B) to do the ceremony - I just hope by the end of next week we have a new fixed date!