For quite a long time this was a very obvious and common sense statement. That is literally the traditional view of the Catholic Church on marriage, for example.
Yes, needless to say an unmarried couple is not what I was referring to. I'm saying that for a long time people have known that not everyone is cut out for marriage, and that it has never really been seen as "the only path". I don't understand your other remarks.
So it's "the only path" if in a relationship, with the alternatives being living in sin or not having a relationship. That is really very traditional Catholicism
Interesting! Sorry if this is getting off topic, but how does the Catholic Church feel about using sex as a method for developing closeness and intimacy with a partner, rather than as purely an avenue for pleasure? I imagine that's still frowned upon?
(Not Catholic, but Orthodox, which is similar enough in this matter.) The idea is more along the lines of saying that just as a human person is both body and soul, and neglect of either leads to death, the Catholic view is that the marriage itself, as well as each "marital act" should be: "Free (voluntary in the fullest sense), Total (complete sharing of self & life with the other), Faithful (to each other, exclusively), and Fruitful (pretty straightforward)". It wouldn't be good enough to say a woman married freely, so consent doesn't matter for each act. Or that a couple is generally monogamous, with some exceptions. So the "procreative" and "unitive" purposes of sex are considered to be inseparable without some debasement of the act. Hope that helps.
I attend my parish often and it is true that a lot of people are leaving but to be honest it doesn't bother me much. As Catholics, if we spend our time worrying about "the numbers" then we've lost the purpose of what it means to be a member of a community. It's not about programs it's about people.
In my (entirely anecdotal) observation, boomers were the last generation to be raised with social pressure to appear to be religious, in communities where Catholic traditions and the Church were a central and reasonably respected part of life. They got married relatively young, baptized their kids and maybe sent them to Catholic schools all to keep their own parents happy, but didn't pressure their kids in the same way.
As the boomers got to middle age and figured out their own way to live, they dropped the pretence. In parallel, the church largely retreated from public life, education, politics, healthcare etc.
It's easy to blame this on the Church or the boomers but it's part of a wider trend of community and common institutions losing their hold. People move further away from family, have less friends, participation in community activities is down across the board, the self-sufficient nuclear family has been pushed as the ideal since the 50s and cultural gatekeeping or telling someone what to do in their own home is the biggest sin.
It's all a trade-off for getting rid of some of the genuinely more awful parts of the pre-war era.
Eh we are around for few thousand of years and we have been through worse.
“And if your right hand should be your downfall, cut it off and throw it away; for it will do you less harm to lose one part of yourself than to have your whole body go to hell.”
I've heard there was a time, ~2000 years ago, when people thought the second coming of christ was so close they were only being asked to be celibate for a year or two, and marriage was only there for people who couldn't manage that.
For quite a long time this was a very obvious and common sense statement. That is literally the traditional view of the Catholic Church on marriage, for example.
Things changed only very recently.