It's called a marriage contract for a reason.

How many of you would marry your second or third choice of partner if you had a better option?

I'm not suggesting that a woman would be wise to focus on worldly things above all else. If she does this she might simply marry a rich cad. What I am saying it that people have a sense of their value and what they can acquire with it.

A good looking, intelligent, virtuous, modest, pious, young woman has it all going for her and if she is intelligent she knows that she has what many men seek. Since as a Catholic she can only give that to one man it makes sense she choose the man with the best overall attributes.

A woman with a first class degree in law is unlikely to want to marry a builder or be happy and mentally stimulated married to a builder. A woman who has grown up in a 5 bedroom house with an acre of yard is unlikely to feel happy with her 5 children squeezed into a two bedroom apartment. If her husband is ideal in every other way and she is a saint in training, then I am sure they could cope well, but 99% of people are far from saintly or ideal.

I know Trad men in their 30s and even late 40s who bemoan not being married but have struggled over the last 10 years to pay their rent or bills. I point out that if they are struggling when they are single because they cannot hold down a job, then how are they going to afford, baby food, diapers, a spare bedroom, higher medical bills, a larger car etc?

Let's have a little realism here. Being a Traditional Catholic today and having a stable home and some reasonably degree of financial security requires the man to earn enough money to support a non-working wife for a period of at least 20 years while she has their children. Those children need to be fed and watered, doctored and nursed, educated, clothed and occasionally holidayed. They require a certain amount of square feet to live in, bath in, sleep in, play in.

If nature takes its normal course you are going to have 5 or 6 children on average over a period of 10 to 15 years. The alternative is prolonged periods of abstinence which comes with its own problems and frustrations. I struggle to believe many couples are mutually happy with this "arrangement". I certainly would not be and neither would my wife.

Rather than bemoaning how the world is not how you'd like it to be one would be better off working out how to make an extra $10-20k per year so that raising your Traditional Catholic family could be slightly easier.

It's not that difficult to operate a small business or offer some moonlighting service. If with your disciplined Catholic mind, clear thinking and logical brain you cannot work out what the steps are and compete against sex-obsessed, drug-addicted people who believe they are the spawn of monkeys then it does not speak very highly for your belief system.

Do you need to become a dotcom billionaire? No. You do however need to be able to pay for the basics or family life and a few luxuries now and again, if you want your children to emulate you in the next generation.

Do you need to become a dotcom billionaire? No. You do however need to be able to pay for the basics or family life and a few luxuries now and again, if you want your children to emulate you in the next generation.

A woman with a first class degree in law

When they canonised JP2 I am going to hand my membership badge back in. If God wants me to stay a Roman Catholic then I need JP2 to not be canonised. God has to step in an prevent it. Destroying Rome would achieve this of course as would the Garabandal Miracle and Warning. Who knows, maybe they'll find some real dirt on JP2 which will stop it at the 11th hour.

I don't think I'll become an SV for several reasons not least that they are trying to preserve a Church that will have fallen into contradiction. Orthodox I'd need to look at closely. The problem with them however is that they are not unified, they are in 31 flavours like Baskin Robbins ice-cream.

At that stage I'll think I'll read the Gospel from start to finish with a pair of fresh eyes and an honest intention. I still think Jesus was real enough and that the Gospels are a great code for living your life. There are pearls of Wisdom in the Gospel that are either Divinely inspired or way about any morality I could come up with. I'll basically become my own boss for the simple reason that sinner though I am I would not break the first commandment or cover up for paedo-priests. It's dangerous being your own Pope, but when the Pope is making it up as he goes along then it is no more dangerous than following him.

Frankly for the last 20 years I've had serious reservations about what has been taken from the Gospels and leveraged and what has been ignored and left out. Christianity seems to have been heavily influenced by the emperor Constatine who as far as I understand it wasn't even a converted Christian until his deathbed.

For example, Jesus seems to make multiple statement that poverty is good and holy and that Christians should seek to have just enough and then give the rest to the poor. Give your coat to a man who needs it and trust in providence.

Hardly any Christians do this however, myself included and the Church has been pretty quiet on the subject for the last 1500 years, and seems to mostly have sided with the Lords and Nobles and Kings, who were little more than the local warlords and mafia strongmen.

The only thing I've done is to live a way below my means and give the difference away, but I still eat nice food and have a comfortable live. I've always driven 12 year old cheap cars rather than brand new ones. I get all but my business clothes from charity shops. I've stayed in budget hotels when I could have afforded 5 star hotels. I don't drink much and I don't smoke either.

I've got major reservations about Traditional Catholicism too. There are some real arseholes in the Traditionalist Camp who lack charity, don't really give a crap about poor, lock themselves into a compound with a sort of bunker mentality (or dream about doing this if they had the money), take a delight in chastizing people over the clothes they wear to mass, or revel in their intellectual superiority. A lot of these asshats can't hold down a full time job and are living at home with their mother until 35 and claiming a welfare check. They ponce around like they are minor nobility. They are no the sort of people I'd want to hang around with. If after all those sacraments, all that prayer and all that grace they turn out like that I tend to wonder whether there is much positive effect from that stuff.

Conversely I've got friends who are evangelical Christian types, Baptists and Methodists who are very pleasant people to have around. They have good sized families, their children love them, they are always willing to come over and help you paint your house, weed the garden etc. Some of them are models of virtue. This leads me to believe that their lives on earth must be pleasing to God.

Not all Christians are good or course. Not all Muslims are evil. The observation of my eyes and my 43 years of life on this planet suggests to me that there are good and bad people everywhere. Selfish people who know the Gospel inside out and back to front and kind, charitable, decent and good people who've never got around to reading it.

I certainly DO have a problem with the idea that 90%+ of people who reach the age of reason are damned to Hell for all eternity. God designed the system. He new what humans were before the fall and understood what their nature would be like after the fall. Any God who creates intelligent beings without asking them first and then damns most of them to hell is to my way of thinking an evil monster.

Universal salvation is horse####. Clearly Hitler and Stalin went to Hell if one exists. But near universal damnation seems totally unjust to me bearing in mind what I observe in the lives of those people around me.

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Conversely I've got friends who are evangelical Christian types, Baptists and Methodists who are very pleasant people to have around. They have good sized families, their children love them, they are always willing to come over and help you paint your house, weed the garden etc. Some of them are models of virtue. This leads me to believe that their lives on earth must be pleasing to God.

WTF? The above is not Catholic.

What do you hope to accomplish by this thread?

My brother makes over 100 k a year as an engineer for the feds. He is 29. Most people are not as intelligent as he is nor should they be. God did not mean for all his children to be engineers. Most people are not endowed with the intelligence to become engineers, medical doctors, or Phd's in non social science fields.