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| To veil or not to veil? |
While looking into some of these Catholic dating websites, the term "5/7" kept popping up. I discovered the expression is slang for members who say they are Catholic but don't agree with all of the Church's teachings. It refers to the 7 yes or no questions that CatholicMatch.com members fill out on their profiles. Do you accept the Church's teachings on:
1) Eucharist 2) Contraception 3) Sanctity of Life 4) Papal Infallibility 5) Premarital Sex 6) Immaculate Conception 7) Holy Orders
Ave Maria Singles has similar "profile-building" questions to weed out non-Catholics or those unfaithful to Church teaching according to the site's founder, Anthony Bouno. Many have suggested the real meaning of "5/7" is that you agree with the Church on all of those things except for 2) Contraception and 5) Premarital Sex.
Leila Miller, author of the blog Little Catholic Bubble places the onus on men. In her post entitled A Disappointing Eureka, she couldn't understand how a guy could accept some of the trickier concepts of the Church while at the same time rejecting two other teachings that seem pretty straightforward. She suspected it had something to do with these men wanting to have lots of sex but her husband explained it boiled down to personal sacrifice. These 5/7 men were fine with dogma as long as they didn't have to give something up. Of course, it's naive to think the 5/7 phenomenon is exclusive to one gender. During my years at a Catholic high school, most of my female friends refused to make those particular personal sacrifices.
How many times have we seen Catholics water down the faith when things hit too close to home? Marriage goes from being a life-long commitment to something that just runs its course when someone new to lust after appears. Missing weekly Mass is no longer a grave sin because you really wanted to sleep in. The Church's teachings turn into suggestions and the Bible is reduced to two words: Don't judge. As long as you are still a "good person" then nothing much should be expected from you.
For these reasons, I think it's good that dating websites have filters so people can find a spouse who meets certain expectations. However, the 7 questions these sites ask can have other consequences as one reviewer of CatholicMatch.com points out.
This person says the answers to these questions are rarely so black-and-white. Forcing people to divulge how they stand can lead to serious problems with the way certain members are perceived especially on the forums. 5/7 could mean they disagree with the Church's stance on not allowing priests to marry or papal infallibility.
The reviewer brings up a great point. Sometimes being excessively obedient is actually the morally wrong thing to do. During the priest sex abuse scandal, there were people who could have exposed this great evil early on but instead they followed orders and kept things quiet for decades. Am I against papal infallibility? When it comes to shielding the priests who covered up heinous crimes, you bet!
Therein lies the conundrum with these questions. Many of the "7/7" Catholics I've met over the years tend to be aloof. Instead of trying to get more young people to attend Mass, they prefer to discuss their favorite Cardinal Virtue or whether or not to use a chin paten during Mass. They feel the Latin Mass is somehow a step above Mass in the vernacular. Wearing a chapel veil is also important because in their minds, Vatican II ruined the Catholic Church. No mention of the sex scandal or corrupt clergy, though. A priest is to be respected and obeyed without question no matter how arrogant or unchristian he acts. Well, this isn't the Middle Ages.
I'm not sure I could date any Catholic who was afraid to embrace critical thought from time to time. A morally healthy Church demands we become something more than mindless zombies who do nothing in the face of injustice. Perhaps these dating websites should allow their members to answer the 7 questions in degrees rather than Yes or No. It would reveal more of what's inside a person's heart.
Ave Maria Singles was founded in 1998 as an online “marriage service” for Catholics who felt frustrated in their search for a spouse. The site's creator once explained, “I'm not after big numbers or big money, but building a service filled with quality people with like minds.” I first heard of the website a few years ago while reading a Catholic message board and decided to check it out.
While many internet dating sites only allow the pubic to view a small sample of member profiles, this didn't seem to be the case with Ave Maria Singles. I was happy to see almost a hundred pages of eligible women listed but as I scrolled through all of the profiles, my curiosity turned to disappointment.
What appeared to be a large number of women really wasn't when you broke down those profiles geographically. Members of Ave Maria Singles not only included people from the United States and Canada but also from countries on other continents. My home state of Massachusetts had just two members and one of them lived very far away from me. “Would love to join you for coffee. Let me check my frequent flier miles.”
Some profiles had missing photos or introductions that read, “I will answer later.” Putting your best foot forward is crucial in the online dating scene and incomplete profiles project laziness. Of all the females on the site, less than a handful intrigued me. Saying, “I love God and going to Mass and I'm looking for a man who embraces Jesus as his Lord and Savior” really doesn't tell me much about the individual behind the profile.
A 6 month membership was $79 and a lifetime membership was $179. Basic memberships could be upgraded to a “premium membership” for an additional fee. If Ave Maria Singles was founded on such a noble intention...to bring Godly people together for the sacrament of marriage, then why must they nickle and dime us like that?
One reviewer on Yelp writes: “Imagine you are a Catholic single. Imagine you are having a hard time meeting people. Imagine a website that tries to take advantage of your insecurities and abuses the fact that you may be a little desperate. It lures you in with the promise of thousands of members and implies that they have a lot of active members. They had 6 active members. In all of Texas.” The reviewer then complains of the site's poor customer service when she asked for an immediate refund.
Another reviewer who met his wife on Ave Maria Singles in 2003 echoes these sentiments. Despite a lifetime membership, the first conversations he had with his wife on the site disappeared from his account after a long period of inactivity. The company agreed to restore them only if he provided an endorsement for the site's “success story” section. After continued discussion, Ave Maria Singles agreed to retrieve the messages for a fee. He remarks such treatment “...isn't much of a reflection of Christian charity, and certainly doesn't represent what Catholics should be seeking and practicing in marriage.”
This reviewer also says that out of curiosity, he decided to investigate the number of women ages 34 to 41 who were currently in the same state he had searched ten years ago. Only 8 hits appeared out of a state with a population of 6 million and he recognized a couple of those profiles from ten years ago! “They advertise that they have had over two thousand marriages take place among members, but that is for all fifty states plus foreign countries, over a period of fifteen years. From that perspective, two thousand isn't that high a number (if all occurred in the U.S., that would be fewer than three per state per year).”
All of this does not give me much faith in online dating and those negative reviews certainly strike a chord. There are people who have reported positive experiences with Ave Maria Singles. They say the website helped them find a spouse when nothing else seemed to work. According to the site's creator, finding your better half “takes God's time, not yours.” He advises staying with it even if five years pass.
Being glib about “God's plan” can be very hurtful to singles especially if you've been alone for such a long time. Charging a large fee just to join and then segregating memberships based on how much more someone pays doesn't seem very Christ-like. Neither does holding a member's cherished correspondence to his future wife hostage. I hope the people behind Ave Maria Singles remember the verse “whatever you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
