To get married in the Catholic church, there are several requirements--you have to take a scantron self-evaluation about your relationship and your ideas of marriage (there are 150 questions, every five or ten questions, the evaluation asks in a slightly different way, "Are you really sure your marriage will be open to children?"), you have to do some counseling with a priest, as well as a premarital interrogation (not as bad as it sounds, but it does make you feel slightly like you got married right then and there without being totally ready when he asks you, "Do you intend to marry for the rest of your life?" [as a side note: the rest of your life is an unfathomably long time--this freaks me out a little bit--I mean, we could live for hundreds of years with all of these medical advancements--couldn't we just get married for five or ten years and then re-evaluate?]), and a pre-Cana class (which involves counseling from married couples).
The other requirement, at least out here in MO (I'm not sure if it's ubiquitous), is an NFP intro class. So, last weekend, Francisco and I drove out to the boondocks of Wentzville, MO, to hear more about cervical crypts and cervical mucus than I'd ever imagined. They let you go to an intro class for any model of NFP you like. Quite by chance (simply because the class was offered when Francisco was visiting), we ended up in a class for the Creighton Model FertilityCare System. (Incidentally, I must admit, I know very little about the differences between different methods and which one is the best.)
The funniest part of the class was that the (nice-as-can-be) woman who was teaching it was very nervous to be speaking to the 10-12 people in the room. In fact, at the beginning of her slide show, there was a diagram of the male anatomy. She giggled awkwardly and switched the slide quickly. And this woman was an RN--an RN who teaches NFP for a job!
My only observation about the Creighton model is that these people sure are into marketing: every other word in the slideshow was a registered trademark--things like NaProTechnology, CrMS, etc. NFP is a very strange thing to be into trademarking and selling, in my opinion.
6 comments:
Did you notice that the questionnaire also asks you several times if you're pregnant? At one point, phrased, "Is pregnancy a part of your life right now?"
My NFP class was taught by a couple (and I totally want to be them when we're old, except for that I totally don't want to teach NFP classes). The man always wanted to get through anything involving mucus (um, that's basically everything) really fast.
Oh yes--sooooo many pregnancy questions! It's as if you might lie on five of the questions, but they'll catch you on the sixth, if they just keep asking.
Ha--even more awkward on a smaller scale, I bet.
This is a slightly weird post to delurk on (I've been reading and enjoying your blog for a couple of months now) but I wanted to say (1) Congratulations! and (2) ohhhh lord do I remember those premarital counseling/NFP/Pre-Cana sessions. We didn't do any scantrons but did kick off with a counseling session by our priest in which we established that no, we were really not pregnant, we really did intend to stay married, and neither of us was currently married to someone else. (I remember asking him if anyone had ever answered yes to that, and he said they hadn't, but that one girl had been busted by her father, who stopped by to tell the priest that she was in fact married to someone else. When asked if he was absolutely sure about this, he said "Hell yeah, I am! I paid for the wedding!") I think the pregnancy thing isn't so much so they can revile you for your sin as to make sure that you're not getting married just because of that.
That being said, I did accidentally unearth a lot of our Pre-Cana paperwork a year or so ago and it was quite nice to see our answers to the different questions and short essays written to each other. As much as it annoyed me at the time, it's nice to have them now.
A) "Delurk" is an awesome word. B) Welcome to the blog. C) Thanks! D) I'm certain you're right--it's about making sure that you don't have pressures on you to marry. I just think it's funny that they repeatedly ask the question with slightly different phrasings (as if you might answer one of the questions, "no" and a different one, "yes").
When I got engaged, my husband was really sad to discover that Catholic premarital counseling is actually only for Catholics, and thought they should offer it as a general charitable service for the young and foolish of all religions, who know no more about what they're getting into than young and foolish Catholics.
Oh wow--that's too bad! I thought that they offered it to non-Catholics--they certainly ought to!
Post a Comment