Joe and Brenda:
“We were surprised with the amount of required work! I’m almost 30 and my wife to be is in her late 20’s. After working all day, and planning our wedding, I would say in total we have spent at least 30 hours working on this. Come on! This is 2013! This just seems a bit old school! Like us, most people already live together. Other religions just sit down with the couple getting married and have a chat. This took up a lot of our time!"

At the same time, this is what a general ad for magazines claims:
Media continues to proliferate. Attention span continues to shrink.
Why then are 93% of Americans adults still so attached to magazines?

“Stop judging, that you may not be judged. For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.  Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove that splinter from your eye,’ while the wooden beam is in your eye?”  (Matthew 7: 1-4, NAB)

Not to long ago, I wrote a blog on the harms of unmet expectations within your marital relationship.  That can be found here:  https://catholicmarriageprep.com/blog/entry/unmet-expectations  

A Jewish Convert, Carmelite, martyred in the gas chambers of Aushwitz, "a daughter of Israel who during the Nazi persecutions was united with faith and love of the Crucified Lord, Jesus Christ, as a Catholic, and with her own people as a Jew." ~ Saint John Paull II.

Original Drawings by Olivier Heitz for CatholicMarriagePrep.com

For thousands of years, human beings have been degrading other human beings via pornography — from Greek pottery to glossy magazines, movies, the internet and more. Today, with isolation, loneliness, lockdowns, and anxiety, mental health problems are on the rise and so is pornography.

It’s well known that pornography earns a lot of money for those who produce it, but less well known is the cost to society in general. Employees who use company computers to look at pornography during work hours cost the economy $17 billion a year, and that’s nothing compared to the human cost.

A little over fifty years ago, Pope Paul VI wrote a document that forever changed the world entitled Humanae Vitae. It may be one of the most controversial documents ever written to date, but it is also one of the most prophetic.This document stated that the Catholic Church, in a time when hormonal birth control was growing in popularity, would stand firm on our teaching that it simply was not acceptable. The Catholic Church stood alone.

PHONES!!!  I have a love/hate relationship with my phone!  I love being able to be reached whenever in the case of an emergency, but I also hate the fact that I can be reached whenever, when it is certainly not an emergency.  I love that I have the freedom to check my emails on my phone, but I hate that I feel that I always have to be caught up on email because it is at my fingertips at all times.  I love that I can upload a picture of my family having fun to my social media account, but I hate the fact that I get trapped on that social media account and waste countless hours a week scrolling through to see what everyone else is posting.  I know smart phones were created for convenience, but I am convinced that Satan had something to do with it!  I truly believe that Satan knew that we would use these phones to destroy our day-to-day life and our real relationships.