Does Your Spouse Lead You Closer to Christ?

On a dating site, this is often a common question.

It’s a hot topic to bring up: whether or not a Catholic should marry another Catholic. It’s an emotionally heavy area of conversation to enter into, I think mostly because it’s filled with so many different testimonies.

There are couples out there who do not share the Catholic faith—one is Catholic and one is not—that have fantastic, fruitful, holy marriages. And there are couples out there who are both Catholic and end up getting divorced. 

Shared faith—by itself—does not make a marriage.

Nor will it—by itself—save it. Marriage is much too complex for it to only need one aspect to align well in order for it to be successful for life.

But shared faith is something that can make a really big difference in your marriage, and therefore your life, and living out your vocation, and chasing sainthood. It is something that may not come into play on surface-level things, like where you want to live, what kind of career you want to pursue, or the places on your traveling bucket list.

But it is something that comes into play when things get hard, like when there is a death in the family, or your fertility journey suddenly looks nothing like you thought it would, or your mental health takes a huge dip.

I used to think that it being the better option for Catholics to marry Catholics was only because it provided consistency.

And in a sense, that is true.

Inconsistency in how you view, interpret and understand the world is a big obstacle to navigate. However, it wasn’t until I went through life-altering events that tested my own faith, that I realized how important it was that my partner’s was the same as mine. 

In 2018 my husband and I lost three babies to miscarriage. Each loss knocked us harder on our butts than the loss before. Each required different but still incredibly deep honesty with one another. Each tested our faith in what God had planned for us and our family. And if it wasn’t for our faith, I truly do not know how we would have gotten through it, individually and together.

With deep pain comes the need for deep healing, the only kind the Christ can give.

We did not choose to lose those babies, and just as it was above our heads that we lost them, it was also above our heads for how to heal on our own. The short answer: we couldn’t. We needed Christ.

There were nights for many weeks after our first miscarriage when I couldn’t sleep, and my husband would just start repeating the Hail Mary prayer until we both fell asleep. There were countless nights after our second miscarriage when one of us practically forced the other to go sit in Adoration—“it doesn’t matter if you don’t want to talk. Just go be.”

And there was a forgiveness that we had to learn to extend to ourselves after our third miscarriage that we only knew because it was first modeled by Christ. 

I was so grateful that we shared the same faith, not for the consistency, but for the intimacy.

The lens of the Passion changes how you see loss, and heartbreak, and seemingly unfair circumstances. And there were times when I couldn’t see the light that my husband could, and vice versa, and it was those times that will be forever ingrained in my memory and in my faith journey. Our losses were not just formative times in our fertility journey, but in our sainthood journey too.

I can’t speak to how things would have been different if one of us wasn’t Catholic, because that was not my experience. And I am certainly not saying that you can’t successfully get through hard things if you aren’t also married to a Catholic, you can.

But there was something pivotal in sharing what we believed when those beliefs were deeply challenged with disappointment, struggle, pain, and doubt. 

Because when you go through times in your life when you struggle with or don’t want to go to Jesus, you need your partner to lead you to Him, just as they promised they would on your wedding day. Those steps up to the foot of the cross can sometimes feel really long, even un-walkable, and it is precisely in those moments that a partner who sees the road the same as you becomes the strength you cannot find for yourself and leads you forward.