By: Emily Stimpson
There’s both good news and bad news about today’s Catholic singles. The good news? They’re not living the single life alone. Today, more unconsecrated single Catholics live in America than at any other point in history. And the bad news? They’re not living the single life alone. Today, more unconsecrated single Catholics live in America than at any other point in history. Nope, that’s not a typo. The good news and the bad news are the same. Although it may be reassuring, in some ways, that today’s unmarried Catholics have lots of company in the single life, it’s also a problem. Never before have quite so many adults, Catholics or otherwise, delayed marriage quite so late in life. Some delay by choice. Others by chance. But marriage is delayed regardless. And the results are often less than rosy.
As statistics collected by the National Marriage Project show, the single life is rife with risk factors. For example, single people in general are two to three times more likely to be depressed than their married peers and far more likely to commit suicide. Singles, particularly men, tend to suffer from more health problems than married individuals, as well as die younger. They are also less financially stable, suffer from higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases and are more apt to be the perpetrators (men) or victims (women) of violent crimes. Cheery, no? Despite that grim statistical picture, however, the single life is not necessarily all gnashing of teeth and weeping. There are, as even the most discontented of singles will grudgingly admit, some definite perks to the single life. Most have a type of freedom and time that their married peers don’t, freedom and time that allows them to pursue professional, intellectual, spiritual and recreational opportunities of all sorts.
There also are plenty of Catholic singles managing to live happy and virtuous lives because of, not in spite of, their singleness. They’re serving God, building up his Kingdom in the world and loving those who cross their path. These singles are going to church, going to confession and not going home from bars with strangers. They’re actually not going home with anyone. They’re both professing and living the Church’s teachings on human sexuality.
Single struggles
Unfortunately, those singles are the minority, even within the Catholic Church. And for as happy and virtuous as that minority might be, most still have their fair share of struggles with their singleness. At the top of most faithful Catholic singles’ list of complaints is their single status itself. Most don’t want to remain unmarried. They want to say “I do.” But finding a spouse who shares their faith and who won’t pressure them to abide by the culture’s sexual norms is something of a trick these days, particularly for women. “The men aren’t there,” said Dave Sloan, who helps run the Atlanta-based national singles outreach Singles Serving Orphans, part of Serving God’s Kids, which sponsors missions trips to a Mexican orphanage multiple times each year. “Go to the parish events. There are loads of attractive, appealing, virtuous women and just a handful of guys. It’s a tough situation.”
Even if a nice Catholic girl or boy is found, however, other problems often get in the way of marriage. Many nice Catholics girls and boys haven’t always been nice Catholic girls and boys. Some have made mistakes in the past that haunt them still. Others bear the wounds of past breakups, divorce or misguided notions about career, family, personal responsibility, the meaning of happiness and the ends of marriage. “So, many single Catholics today simply have no idea what a healthy, committed Catholic marriage looks like,” said Anastasia Northrop, the founder of the National Catholic Singles Conference. “If you don’t have an example of that, how do you know it’s possible to live it?” Whether the wounds and inability to commit are their own or another’s, those problems leave many unmarried Catholics struggling, to varying degrees, with profound loneliness.
“That loneliness is the key issue for most singles,” Sloan said. “The human person was made to be in a family, a community. We image God, who is a family, and we were made to share our life with others.” They also leave many singles asking some big questions about God. “Their life isn’t turning out as they expected, so they want to know where God is in their singleness. Did he forget them? Why are they still single? And what do they do about it?” said Catholic Match columnist and “Real Love” (Ignatius Press, $14.95) author Mary Beth Bonacci.
| Statistics |
|---|
| 59 million – The number of unmarried, never-been-married adults living in the United States in 2010.13 million -The number of unmarried, never-been-married Catholic adults living in the United States.
Single men’s mortality rates are 250 percent higher than their married peers. Single women’s mortality rates are 50 percent higher than their married peers. Single men are twice as likely to commit suicide as married men. 40 percent of married people say they are happy with their lives as opposed to 25 percent of single people. Single men drink twice as much as married men. Single women are five times more likely to be victims of crime than married women. Less than 20 percent of adult singles attend Church on a regular basis. Nearly two-thirds of single adults feel Church has nothing to offer them. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, Barna Research Group, National Marriage Project |
Not fitting the mold
For all those reasons and more, the Church sympathizes with singles, both the faithful variety and the less-than-faithful variety. It understands the path they’re on isn’t an easy one. It wants to help. It just isn’t sure how. That uncertainty is evident in the state of Catholic singles ministry nationwide. In a few choice locales, it’s thriving. Where singles in general and Catholic singles in particular are in great supply – cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. – events for unmarried Catholics can be found most any night of the week. Happy hours, Theology on Tap, service projects, Bible studies and book clubs are all there for those willing to take advantage of them. Those events provide opportunities for spiritual formation, opportunities for singles to help the less fortunate, and opportunities for meeting potential mates. There also are events on the national level, like Northrop’s National Catholic Singles Conference, now in its seventh year, and Sloan’s Singles Serving Orphans mission trips, as well as online communities such asCatholic Match and Ave Maria Singles.
Once you get outside the major cities and away from the national scene, however, you have to start looking harder for thriving singles ministries. A lot harder. According to Sloan, in recent years most Catholic dioceses have scaled back their outreach to singles and young adults, eliminating young adult ministers or reducing their positions to part time. Tough financial times account for some of those decisions, but Sloan believes something else is at work. “The challenges singles face are grave and overwhelming,” he told OSV. “They’re also entirely new. The Church hasn’t figured out how to respond to them, and so the challenge is easier not to face.” It’s not just dioceses struggling to confront that challenge, however. Parishes struggle, too. “When people find themselves single later than they thought they would be, their instinct often is to go to God,” Bonacci said. “But when they do, what they find are parish structures built around families, and they don’t know how to break in.
“It’s not a bad thing for parishes to be concerned about families,” she added. “Families need all the help they can get. But parishes need to find ways to incorporate those who don’t fit into the family programming mold – sacramental prep, Catholic schools and catechetical programs.”
Hard to pin down
No one (or almost no one) questions that. But the dilemma remains: How? “It’s a hard demographic to pin down,” said Christopher Chapman, associate director of Youth and Young Adult Ministry in the Diocese of Pittsburgh. “You’ve got Catholic singles who are 25, and you’ve got Catholic singles who are 55. The 25-year-olds don’t want to socialize with the 55-year-olds, and the 55-year-olds don’t want to socialize with the 25-year-olds.” There’s also widely varying levels of formation and perceived needs among Catholic singles, he said. “You’ve got Catholics who went to devout Catholic schools, and you’ve got Catholics who weren’t taught their faith and left the Church. You’ve got Catholics who hear about a Bible study and think, ‘That’s exactly what I want.’ And you’ve got Catholics who think ‘That’s exactly what I don’t want.’ The unifying need that attracts married Catholic to events – namely their children’s sacramental prep and education – isn’t there. “Even when you get a successful program going, it only lasts so long,” he continued. “Unmarried Catholics meet, get married, and the energy dies out.” Finally, Chapman told OSV, simply reaching single Catholics is a very different proposition than reaching their married peers. “Fewer go to Church. They don’t have kids in the schools. And they don’t read the diocesan paper,” he said. “They’re everywhere, but nowhere.”
Less ‘churchy’ events
For those reasons, the growing consensus among those involved in singles ministry is that a multi-pronged approach, which encompasses evangelization, formation, socialization and opportunities for service, needs to be taken. In Bonacci’s Denver-area parish, they’re attempting an end run around the diverse age range by hosting events for singles that are more substantive than social. After the teaching is over, people still socialize, but they tend to break off into age-appropriate groups. “There is a social need,” Bonacci said. “We just think it’s better served by letting them find each other through deeper things.” In Atlanta, Sloan has seen service projects and events that are less “churchy” in nature draw single Catholics in and connect them to other single Catholics, as well as provide them with the resources they need for healing and formation. He also said that other dioceses, such as Los Angeles, have had success with Catholic Underground – a “concert-meets-coffee house” style evening that features Eucharistic adoration.
Taking charge
Where those types of programs don’t exist, Northrop urges singles to stop waiting for the hierarchical Church to act. “We’re adults,” she said. “We need to take responsibility. So, if someone is single and wishes their parish offered more, they should start something.” Along those same lines, Chapman noted, Catholics should stop thinking of “singles ministry” as something the priest or the bishop is called to do and start thinking of it as something they are called to do. “The programmatic way is not always the best way,” he said. “More often, the best things come out of personal influence. Ultimately, this seems to be the proper province of laypeople who are in the world, living and working next to single people. We all have to make a conscious effort to form fellowship across lines of age or state in life. “Families are the domestic Church,” Chapman said. “Any time a couple invites a single person out to dinner because they think he might be lonely or offers to set him up on a blind date, that is the Church reaching out to single people.”
Credit to Emily Stimpson of EmilyStimpson.com