They should spend as much effort in discovering ways to make marriages
into life-long celebrations and sources of joy

Actually, Amos, they do. When I got married in the Catholic Church the second time, we had to wait six months and had to go through a very nice marriage preparation program. The people who did our preparation went to our wedding, and they've kept in touch with us afterwards.

I was in the Army the first time I got married (1971), and the situation made it much more difficult to get good marriage preparation (although I'm quite sure that no amount of preparation could have saved THAT marriage, even though we held on for twenty years). Even in 1971, most U.S. Catholic parishes had pretty good marriage preparation programs. And yes, they do a lot of positive things to support family life after the wedding day.

Sure, there have been incidents of repression, "coercion and overwhelm," and all that bad stuff all through the history of the Catholic Church and of many churches - that's the kind of stuff that makes headlines. And yes, in my years of working in the church, I have come across a number of incidents that distressed and angered me - but the vast majority of encounters I have had in church have been positive ones.

-Joe Offer-