INDIANAPOLIS (RNS) — “My standards are so high that me and Jesus go after the same men,” Mari Pablo told the crowd in a packed ballroom at the National Eucharistic Congress. No less than three men Pable had dated, she said, later discerned calls to the priesthood. The audience of more than 350, most of them single Catholics, laughed appreciatively.
Pablo, a ministry consultant with the Evangelical Catholic, a Catholic mentorship group, was a panelist at a spirited discussion on dating as a Catholic, hosted by the Catholic Project on Friday (July 19) at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ five-day evangelization mega-event in Indianapolis, which runs through Sunday.
The discussion featuring a back-and-forth among six panelists, two moderators and an eagerly involved audience followed a social hour where single Catholics milled around a bar nibbling appetizers to upbeat pop and country tunes on the room’s speakers.
Other panelists included Chika Anyanwu, author of “My Encounter: How I Met Jesus In Prayer”; Cody Etheridge, a marketing and communications specialist at the Catholic University of America; John Mittel, co-founder of the company that created the beverage Phocus; Lucas Kaliszak, a medical student and content creator for dating site CatholicMatch; and Lillian Fallon, author of “Theology of Style: Expressing the Unique and Unrepeatable You.”
Dating while discerning religious vocations was just one subject that came up during the evening. The best place to meet other single Catholics was a hot topic, as was how to deal with today’s gender dynamics.
On discerning vocations, an attendee named Monica shared the advice she gleaned from the Rev. Mike Schmitz, the Catholic priest whose Bible study podcast has drawn hundreds of millions of downloads, when a young man at a Congress event announced, “I’m dating a beautiful woman that I love but I also am discerning the priesthood.” Schmitz cautioned, “Discern one at a time.”
The attendees in Indianapolis had logged their responses via a QR code on their phone to the question, “What adjective would you use to describe how you feel about dating as a Catholic today?”
“Hopeless,” loomed large in the resulting word cloud.
Many in the ballroom said the dating pool of similarly committed Catholics was too small. “It’s hard just because there are so few of us,” said Ryan Rivera, a student at the University of Notre Dame who told Religion News Service he was looking for a “good, strong Catholic pro-life woman.”
“It’s almost the norm out there to be pro-choice, especially if you’re a woman,” said Rivera.
“A lot of people no longer really adhere to the Catholic teachings,” said another attendee, Emily Schmidt, who called her experience of the congress as a whole “soothing.”
“Everyone’s so like-minded,” she said. “Everyone’s on the same page, not Catholic in name only. They truly believe it’s the Eucharist.”
Sara Perla, communications manager for the Catholic Project, a Catholic University of America initiative, co-moderated the dating panel. Perla told the crowd that organizers had considered creating a speed dating event but that sign-ups had initially run 78% female.
That imbalance, theorized CUA student Matt Cutrona, resulted from years in which “the idea of Catholic masculinity … has really been trampled on.”
The panelist Kaliszak said that a woman can have “an expectation about how a guy should act, and he has no idea what that is.”
But Fallon countered that women don’t owe men patience if they don’t show commitment. The popular saying “If he wanted to, he would” applies, she said, advising women: “If you’re confused about whether a guy likes you, he’s not interested. Don’t pursue it.”
Alison Vigland, an audience member, said women had their own disappointments when it comes to dating. “I think this is true for the majority of women. God created us, we have a desire to be pursued, and if I have to turn that around, and I have to become the main pursuer, that’s actually unattractive to me,” she told the audience.
Mariana Flores, a San Antonio physician, first heard about the congress after seeing Fallon posting on Instagram about the dating event. As a doctor, Flores told RNS, she loves the theology of the body outlined in a series of papal lectures about sexuality and gender by St. John Paul II from 1979 to 1984.
“I want to start a family. I want to get married. That is a vocation that I have a big desire in my heart to start,” Flores said.
There was no discussion at the event of relationships other than heterosexual ones. While multiple Catholic ministries, such as Jesuit-sponsored Outreach, welcome people who are in same-gender relationships, the LGBTQ+ ministries represented at the congress, such as Eden Invitation, emphasize chastity outside of heterosexual marriage.
Indeed, LBGTQ+ Catholics may have taken a message from the presence of JD Flynn, Perla’s co-moderator and the co-founder of The Pillar, a conservative Catholic news website. In 2021, The Pillar published reports based on purchased cellphone data alleging that the then-general secretary of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, had a downloaded Grindr, a dating app used by gay men, on his phone. Burrill later stepped down from his position.
Perla explained that part of the Catholic Project’s impetus in sponsoring the event was her group’s dedication “to the collaboration of the laity and the clergy in resolving the long-term challenges that the church is facing.” One of those challenges, she said, is “the fact that we’re not getting married.”
Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate’s 2023 data found that in the previous year there had been 111,245 Catholic marriages in the 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands, down from 426,309 in 1970.
Flynn seemed fixed on reversing the trend as he roamed the ballroom with a microphone to hear from Catholics in the audience, often hyping their attractive qualities or making quips.
At the beginning of the session, Flynn asked the men in the room to raise their left hand and the women in the room to raise their right hand, then prompted those next to each other to hold hands.
“We have our first couple of the evening,” Flynn exclaimed, bounding over to Vigland and Peter Burke, who discovered they were both from Texas.
“What we want is for you to be able to meet each other in time to be able to go to (Eucharistic) adoration together tonight,” Flynn said.
But Perla advised against asking people on dates to adoration, calling it “creepy and weird” before some in the audience pushed back.
After the panel, RNS caught up with Vigland and Burke, who said they both enjoyed the experience.
“I feel like there are a lot of people who are on the same page, but we don’t talk about it much,” Vigland said of discussing dating with the crowd. The two told RNS they had not exchanged contact information.
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