Interfaith and interchurch couples face unique challenges to building strong marriages.

Before Juliann Richards met Neal Levy, she didn’t doubt that she’d marry a fellow Catholic someday. After all, Richards was raised Catholic, attended Catholic school, grew up mostly around fellow Catholics, and knew she wanted her children raised with the same faith.

“For many years, I told myself (and others) that I was going to the nearby Catholic college so I could meet a nice Catholic boy and get married,” Richards recalls.

But when she met Levy—who is Jewish—the two quickly became friends and eventually started dating. Fast-forward several years: Richards and Levy, both 27, are newlyweds who married in a Jewish-Catholic ceremony.

Such marriages—interfaith (between a Catholic and a non-Christian) and interchurch (between a Catholic and another Christian)—have been on the rise for the past 30 years.

In fact, a 2007 survey on marriage by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) revealed that marrying another Catholic is a low priority for young Catholics. Of never-married Catholics, only 7 percent said it was “very important” to marry someone of the same faith.

“We realize that this is a major pastoral issue,” says Sheila Garcia, associate director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat on Laity, Marriage, Family Life, and Youth.

Good foundation

Garcia says that while supporting these couples pastorally, the church also is concerned with making sure the Catholic in a mixed-religion marriage continues to practice his or her faith and that the couple takes seriously the Catholic party’s pledge to raise their children Catholic.

Despite these challenges, Garcia believes that mixed marriages offer an opportunity for “peace and understanding, and, where possible, unity.”

“The Catholic Church is moving towards how to support the interchurch/interfaith couple,” Garcia says. “Mixed religion couples can live out Christ’s call to be one.”

One of the landmark changes in how the church approaches interfaith and interchurch engaged couples came with the 1983 revision to the Code of Canon Law, around the same time many of the millennials getting married today were born. Before the revision, the non-Catholic party had to sign a document saying they agreed that their children would be raised Catholic. Post-revision, the Catholic spouse pledges to maintain his or her faith and “to do all in her or his power so that all offspring are baptized and brought up in the Catholic Church.” The non-Catholic is informed of that pledge.

“We’ve changed quite a bit of stuff since Vatican II,” says Claretian Father Greg Kenny. “I don’t think allegiance to one church or one faith should keep you from the most basic command, that you should love one another.”

Kenny says the way the Catholic Church should deal with the growing number of interfaith marriages is on a grassroots level, one couple at a time, with parish and diocesan programs.

“If we can get across to people that religion is not getting in the way, that religion is there to help, that makes so much more sense to me,” he says. “Marriage preparation becomes a possible moment of grace.”

A nice Catholic boy

Despite the rise in interfaith and interchurch marriages, they’re not at an all-time high. According to CARA, the highest rate of interfaith marriages took place in the 1970s and 1980s, when young Catholics dispersed from East Coast and Midwestern cities into areas of the country where there were fewer Catholic enclaves.

But as Ohio couple Richards and Levy illustrate, attraction and love can trump proximity to potential partners of the same faith. While Richards’ Ohio hometown has three Catholic churches and a majority Christian populace, once she met Levy all her plans for a “nice Catholic boy” disappeared.

As they dated, the two made sure big issues like how their children would be raised or what religious traditions were important to them were discussed respectfully and resolved early on without either forgoing their faith.

When the two decided to get married, the prospect of planning for a Jewish-Catholic ceremony and, more importantly, a marriage got easier when they found an understanding priest, Father David Bline, pastor of St. Francis de Sales Parish in Akron, Ohio. Bline had worked with Rabbi Susan Stone on another interfaith marriage and put the couple in touch with her.

Richards and Levy went through both Catholic and Jewish pre-marital counseling and were surprised at how “refreshingly similar” the advice they received from both sides was. “It was good to know that the same things were being asked of us,” Richards says.

They plan to raise their children Catholic, but they both say their kids will be well aware of their Jewish heritage, and they were encouraged to raise them as such by Bline.

Respect for both of their beliefs extended into their wedding ceremony, which was led by both the priest and the rabbi. There were readings from the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament, signing of an interfaith ketubah (a Jewish marriage contract), drinking from a kiddush cup, and the couple stood under a chuppah, or canopy during the ceremony. All the ceremony components were explained to guests in an extensive program.

Richards and Levy say being rasised in “very open and accepting families,” has helped support them throughout their relationship.

Family conflict

Things went differently for Midwesterners Sarah and Mike Miles (not their real names), who were surprised at just how much tension their own Jewish-Catholic union churned up in Mike’s family.

This is Sarah’s second marriage. In her first, which lasted about three years, she married a fellow Jew. “It was important for me to marry someone Jewish at that time,” she says, adding that her mother was also a big advocate of marrying someone of the same faith.

Mike was raised Catholic, in what he calls a “very religious family.” He went to a Catholic school and attends Mass regularly.

“When I started dating and when I met Sarah, religion wasn’t a factor,” he says.  “I wasn’t marrying someone because of her religion. I was marrying Sarah because she was who she was.”

When they got engaged, both Sarah and Mike took interfaith marriage preparation classes, which helped with tough discussions they had about raising kids, celebrating holidays, and dealing with family dynamics.

The classes suggested they pick one religion for their future children. “We chose Judaism early on because it was the root of all Christianity, and there was nothing in my religion that Mike couldn’t understand,” Sarah says.

It wasn’t until after they were married and the topic of children came up that Mike’s parents voiced their disagreement with how their grandchildren would be raised. They also complained that the Jewish traditions had overshadowed the Catholic traditions at the Miles’ wedding.

Sarah and Mike decided to go to an interfaith marriage counselor and tried to talk with Mike’s parents. But face-to-face conversations, letters, and phone calls didn’t seem to help.

Several years later, Sarah and Mike have a distant relationship with Mike’s parents. But the difficulties have only brought them closer, they say.

“We’d like [his parents] to be a part of [our lives], and we welcome that opportunity, but only if we can get these issues resolved.”