Hi, Christine —

It is wrong and it is a good way to destroy your life emotionally as well as in other ways. I've picked out a few postings for you to read that will give you the reasoning.

• If you know you are going marry a person, why is sexual activity wrong before marriage?
• Can I marry a lapsed Jehovah's Witness in the Church with Her blessings?

I said in the second web posting above:

Hope they help,

Mike
[Related Resource]

Just to add to what Mike has said Christine,

If you present any children from this relationship to the Church for Baptism, the Church has no authority to grant Baptism. The Church can only baptize babies, based on the faith being professed the parents.

At a Baptism, the parents are asked if they renounce Satan and accept the Church. If you are living together, your lifestyle indicates that you neither reject Satan nor accept the Church so the Church can't baptize your children on that basis. The Church has no reason to think that the children will be brought up as Catholics if the parents aren't living as Catholics.

I hope that you will prayerfully consider the ramifications of the choices you are about to make.
God loves us all unconditionally. That's why He's given us rules to live by. They are for our own benefit. His Love may be unconditional but our response to that love, determines our eternity.

God is merciful and will always forgive what we confess and turn away from but we can't confuse the Love and Mercy of God, with leniency. God, forgives us, if we repent. That is not the same as saying He doesn't care what we do or He'll let obstinate sin go unpunished.

I know this may be hard to accept especially in this day and age, when the word sin has disappeared from our vocabulary and people can't spell fornication, let alone define it as unmarried people having sex.

Nevertheless, it is serious sin, that destroys the soul, if it is not repented of, so I encourage you to take it to God in prayer.

Under His Mercy,

John D.

Dear Christine,

You seem to have a very common contemporary attitude toward religion, a sort of consumer mentality, where religion is something that adds to your life, but does not determine your life. You seem to be making decisions on a financial basis.

True religion is about what we owe God, how we worship Him in prayer and with our lives. Fortunately, God came to earth to reveal Himself and extended His presence with us through the Catholic Church and her sacraments and teachings, which are the deeds and words of Jesus. The question is not whether something is wrong in the eyes of the Church or in your eyes, but whether something is good or evil, whether it is wrong in itself.

To be sure, one can live in a common law marriage if one is unable to find a way to be married in the Church — this used to be common in mission territories, and the priest would come and bless all the marriages of the year at one time.

Marriage is a community event, not a private one. It requires some official witnesses for both Church and State, otherwise all sorts of abuses would creep in (which used to happen, to the detriment of women mostly, until the witness part was made mandatory). If two people can't trust the Lord enough to get married in Him, and trust Him to care for them, and they can't trust each other with their money, then they should not get married.

Children deserve a stable union. Living together is inherently unstable, statistically very unstable, and marriages that follow living together have a very high divorce rate. So you are risking your future children's well being and security all for the sake of a financial consideration.

The Church can baptize the children of your union — I just read the directives of the bishop of Austin on such things, and it is possible — but there has to be some reasonable belief that the parents will raise the child in the faith. It used to be very common that children were baptized and brought up Catholic by couples living in irregular unions, and often the children later evangelized the parents. But there is no reason for you to deny yourself the sacraments, and subject your children to all these difficulties and tensions (such as, Why don't you go to Communion, Mom?)

I suggest that you start a campaign of prayer. Submit your plans to God and ask Him to let you know His will. He will. He loves you way more than you love yourself.

Mary Ann

Hi, Christine —

Based on the information presented by Mary Ann, I stand corrected with respect to the issue of the baptism of the children from this union.

That said, as Mary Ann pointed out, it is possible for them to receive Baptism, but the Church would need reasonable assurances that the children would be brought up as Catholics. That still seems rather difficult. Catholicism is not a buffet. One either:

• accepts all the Churches teachings and her authority, or
• one is not in full union with the Church.

Hence, a couple openly defying the Church's teaching on cohabitation, will have an extremely difficult time bringing up their children as Catholics. Sooner or later, one of the children is going to ask why mommy and daddy aren't married when we learned in faith formation that men and woman need to be married before they live together.

At that point, if the couple wants to honor their promise to bring up the children as Catholics, they will have to say, The Church is right and what mommy and daddy are doing is sin.

So while there may be some pastoral exceptions whereby children can be baptized in these situations, I can't see how it can work in vast majority of them.

John D.