Western Carolina Catholic Campus Ministry is going to see The Dating Project movie Tuesday, April 17, 7:00pm at Regal Cinemas Biltmore Grande 15 & RPX [292 Thetford Street Asheville, NC] and would love for some AVL|CCM folks to join them.
The Dating Project is a film produced by several Catholic production companies, including Paulist Press, as a one night movie event. “Change the Dating Conversation! Is there a better way to find love than swiping left or right? Follow the story of five single adults, as they navigate the dating scene.”
Dating, not being a universal human experience, is not a topic the Church explicitly has a lot to say on. However, the Church has a lot to say on Marriage, or the Sacrament of Matrimony, which would be the ideal “end,” or reason, for why one would date. In all our actions, we should consider the end, or why, we’re doing any particular action. If we identify the end as being good, then we will also makes sure that the intention behind and action, and the means to that end, or how we accomplish our action, will also be good.
So let us consider the good of marriage when thinking about dating (from the Catechism):
1604 God who created man out of love also calls him to love the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. For man is created in the image and likeness of God who is himself love. Since God created him man and woman, their mutual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man. It is good, very good, in the Creator’s eyes. and this love which God blesses is intended to be fruitful and to be realized in the common work of watching over creation: “and God blessed them, and God said to them: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.'”
1605 Holy Scripture affirms that man and woman were created for one another: “It is not good that the man should be alone.” The woman, “flesh of his flesh,” i.e., his counterpart, his equal, his nearest in all things, is given to him by God as a “helpmate”; she thus represents God from whom comes our help. “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.” The Lord himself shows that this signifies an unbreakable union of their two lives by recalling what the plan of the Creator had been “in the beginning”: “So they are no longer two, but one flesh.”
Asheville Catholic Campus Ministry 