Stood up at the altar: it's the church that's feeling jilted these days, as fewer couples are going to the chapel to get married. Perhaps we should be looking in the mirror when wondering why.

Will your children get married in the Catholic Church?

"It depends." That was the surprising answer from my 31-year-old son, Brian, who goes to Mass most Sundays and periodically plays guitar at liturgies. As a veteran family life minister, I had been researching the trend of the declining number of Catholics getting married in the church. After hearing his reasoning, however, I understood.

"I would want to decide this with my fiancee, who might not be Catholic," he said. "I would want the decision to be mutual, not just me declaring a nonnegotiable." Intuitively he was voicing at least one quality of a sacramental marriage--a partnership of equals based on mutuality and a respect for the beloved.

Then I asked my daughter, Heidi, a 28-year-old who has recently been reconsidering Catholicism after having left it behind in college. What would influence her to get married in the church?

"I think the church should have a lot to offer," she said. "I mean, when people are looking to get married, that's exactly when they want--a deeper meaning. I sure hope I'm thinking about more than flower arrangements when I get married."

Meaning--that's where the Catholic Church can stand. We have the depth and the heritage to carry the weight of a marriage commitment. The Catholic Church has a long tradition of sacred vows, supported by a heritage of generosity and self-sacrifice that can hold a couple together over the long haul. Church rituals carry solemnity, and church community can support the couple long after the wedding.

Maybe the problem is that we're too busy enforcing rules to inspire engaged couples to see the deeper spirituality the church has to offer them. One 28-year-old New Yorker, who asked not to be named, is a lifelong Catholic who recently got engaged. She and her fiance wanted to get married in the town and Catholic church she attended most of her life in another state. The initial call to the parish, however, was discouraging.

"First, the secretary asked if I was a parishioner. I explained that I had moved but that my parents are members, and I go to church there when I'm in town. Reluctantly my call was forwarded to the priest. After confirming that I was Catholic, he asked if my fiance was Catholic. Upon hearing that he was not, the priest asked if he would consider converting. When I replied, 'Not at this time,' the priest said that that would be a problem. I explained that my parents had a successful mixed-religion marriage. He replied that it may seem that way, but he would argue that something is lacking in their marriage since God is the glue that helps marriages endure. I got off the phone as quickly as I could and then started to cry out of frustration and anger."

After trying 10 more local parishes and being blocked by the question "Are you a parishioner here?" she started wondering if she really wanted to remain a Catholic. Eventually she found a priest who welcomed her and her fiance. After receiving a letter from her New York parish saying she was a member there, he agreed to host the wedding. She is grateful to the priest who restored her faith. "He went out of his way to welcome us and affirmed our love saying that it was a holy thing to love each other. We're now looking through scriptures to find ones that speak to us. It started with the priest saying, 'You are welcome here.'" Her parents have now changed to this more welcoming parish, too.

But she started out with a determination to get married in the church. There's a whole other group of young Catholics who are "missing in action," as Kate DeVries, associate director of Young Adult Ministry for the Chicago archdiocese, puts it. They stopped practicing their faith after they left home or college, sometimes right after they were confirmed.

"They still consider themselves Catholic. At least they don't claim any other religion and still believe in God, but it's been a long time since they've graced the door of a Catholic church, if you don't count Christmas Mass with parents," DeVries says.

So how does this translate to a couple's decision to marry in the Catholic Church? I polled nearly 500 family ministers across the United States and the numbers weren't good:

* In the Dallas/Fort Worth diocese, attendance at marriage preparation programs is down 23 percent in the last year.

* The Diocese of Orlando prepared 20 percent fewer couples in 2004 than in 1997.

* In 2003 the Diocese of Toledo, Ohio had 1,670 marriages, compared with 1,856 in 2002.

* There has been a 35-percent drop in church-recorded marriages over the past 20 years, compared to a 10-percent decline for the general U.S. population.

For years my colleagues in family ministry and I have been saying that the young adults who often took a vacation from church during college would return when they were ready to marry, or at least at Baptism or First Communion as they had children. Perhaps we should call these "sacraments of return" rather than sacraments of initiation.

As couples marry later and delay child rearing, however, the length of time away makes a return less likely. Maybe it's busy lifestyles, maybe it's being twenty-something or having only uninspiring memories of Mass growing up. But flocks of young adults are abandoning the church of their youth, and they're not coming back.

Some of the decline in church marriages should worry us, and some should not. For example, we have no control over national demographics showing that there are fewer people of marrying age due to the "baby bust" generation. In addition, couples are marrying at a later age, also skewing the statistics.

There are also honorable reasons not to get married in the church. Although it may seem counterintuitive, the positive side of such a decision is honesty. For generations the Catholic Church has carried a plethora of nominal Catholics. They got married in the church to please relatives, because it provided an elegant setting, or out of inertia. As young adults are thinking more for themselves, blind Catholic identity no longer is enough to hold them. We can offer them a deeper identity, but we can't make them believe.

But there are other reasons that Catholic couples are not marrying in the church. Troubling as they may be, they deserve attention because they point the way forward.

1. Cohabitation. Nationally cohabitation before marriage is approximately 50 percent, according to research done by the National Marriage Project based at Rutgers University. Catholic trends don't seem to be far behind, according to diocesan family life directors.

Because of the church's continuing teaching of the importance of reserving sex to marriage, many young people have abandoned their connection to the church. Cohabitation is becoming normal. For some couples it's a sincere prelude to a permanent commitment, but too often it's driven by the media, prolonged adolescence, and hormones. This is troubling because the culture that has given rise to sex without permanent commitment has not also conveyed the harm done to marriages when that sexual bond is taken too lightly.

2. Interfaith marriages and marriages after divorce. Interchurch or interfaith marriages are inevitable in an increasingly pluralistic society that no longer shelters Catholic young adults in a cocoon of Catholic culture. It means that Catholics serious about their faith need to negotiate and compromise if marrying a non-Catholic. Often the partner with the stronger religious conviction wins. It is arrogant to presume still that the default faith will always be Catholic. In an effort not to offend, couples may choose a neutral church or, more likely, those who do not have strong affiliation choose no church.

Then there's the divorced Catholic, or a Catholic marrying a divorced person. Though the annulment process can be healing when done sensitively, often the Catholic partner thinks that it isn't fair to force a non-Catholic divorced partner to go through the pain of digging up all that old stuff to get an annulment. The default position is to get married in a church that puts fewer barriers in the way of the marriage.

3. Loss of Catholic connection and identity. Because many Catholics have fuzzy notions of the content of their faith and have not experienced a vibrant, meaningful faith community, their investment is low. Why affiliate with something that doesn't feed you? Much of this is what my daughter was complaining of when she told me she wanted meaning. She said she'd shopped around to some churches in her area and had a hard time finding one that she felt was about more than rote prayers and motions--one that really offered a faith community.

4. Disenchantment with the institutional church. The declining rate in Catholic Church-recorded marriages can also be a symptom of a deeper malaise: that of a crippled church. Randy Haskins, 30, of Dayton, Ohio, says, "I'm just turned off by the Catholic Church. It's hard for me to take seriously all these regulations about getting married in the church when the church covers up scandals like pedophilia and refuses to even discuss ordaining married men or women. I see too many priests and bishops living in wealth while the poor are next to us. I still hold core Catholic beliefs and value the sacraments, but the institutional church is hypocritical. It's like they can't see the plank in their own eye because they are busy creating rules for the rest of us to follow. I have a personal spirituality but don't see the need to affiliate with the church of my youth. If the church cleans up its act, I'll check it out again."

Not only young adults, but even those with long faith histories, are tiring of a church riddled with scandal or stuck in medieval policies that don't allow the Spirit to work in new ways and through married ministers. For those of us in our 50s and 60s, Vatican II gave us hope and new life. For many young adults, Vatican II may simply sound like the pope's summer home.

The complaints and challenges are significant. How to respond? Here are some starting points:

1. Be worthy of their time. Attracting couples back to the Catholic Church starts with being a church worthy of their time. This may sound unduly deferential, but we must stop being a complacent, middle-aged church--not just to attract young people but because that is how Jesus worked. He turned the system upside down and railed against those who were too caught up in the rules.

The church may hold baby boomers out of habit, duty, or renewal movements, but it won't hold their children, who may never have learned the meaning behind sacred symbols and rituals. This generation wants challenging homilies, substantive adult faith formation, and a community that reaches out to them.

It starts in youth ministry groups, schools, and vibrant parish liturgies. This needn't mean rock music Masses with slideshow homilies. But we need to dig deeper to recover the soul of our church and express it in a variety of ways. Not all Masses or parishes will be appealing to young people. That's OK. But if a medium-sized city doesn't have several places that are tuned into the young adult culture with holy and persuasive speakers who can touch their hearts, then we are burying our talents and we will be judged for it.

2. Be welcoming. Of course the church needs to be welcoming to everyone who knocks, but in the case of engaged couples, it means taking them where they are--not judging their worthiness. True, they may not be virgins. Yes, they may be living together. Yes, they may be divorced. But matters of a sexual nature are not the only vices of Christians. How many of us sin by self-indulgence or hoarding wealth? Yet we are accepted into this community of believers.

When a couple approaches the rectory to inquire about marriage, their first experience needs to be a lace-to-face conversation with a church representative who welcomes them unconditionally and wants to know about the love that brought them together. There will be details to work out and at least some policies to explain, but these must never supersede a warm welcome.

If the pastor does not have this talent, he should be wise enough to delegate this task to those who do. In the case of cohabitation, rather than seeing it as an obstacle, the marriage minister should treat the couple's presence as a graced time in which we invite them to a fuller understanding of their relationship.

As Amy Collier, director of marriage ministry at All Saints Catholic Newman Center in Tempe, Arizona, says, "I receive many calls from young couples wanting to marry in the church who have perhaps not been very active recently. As I meet each couple at this spiritual crossroads in their lives, where they may or may not choose to return to their faith, I remind myself of the weight my words carry--welcoming or unwelcoming."

3. Offer more meaning. Couples can now design a picturesque wedding ceremony in a lovely natural setting or an elegant hotel. They don't need the church for that. They don't need the church to ratify their sexual choices. They are, however, seeking meaning that the world cannot give. A sacramental marriage is grounded in a faithful, enduring, covenant relationship in which their spirits are joined, not just their bodies. The church understands these yearnings and has always held up values like self-sacrifice for the beloved, unconditional love, and a generous, life-giving lifestyle.

Being joined in a lifelong journey toward God gives meaning to life when worldly comforts prove hollow. The church can offer a community of mentors and cheerleaders to support their marriage in a world that says if something is getting old, or you're getting tired of your spouse, get a new one. More meaning will take more time and investment of the couple and the church, but as we help couples see that their marriage will be stronger when supported by a faith community with generations of wisdom, they will come.

4. Follow up. The Catholic Church has the most extensive and intensive marriage preparation network in the United States. We also are in the forefront of marriage education, marriage enrichment, and marriage counseling across the lifespan.

But it's a secret. Many couples are not aware of this because they dropped out after high school or college when the church seemed dead to them. We must be as creative as our culture is in finding inventive ways to reach out to young adults, letting them know that the church does not just care about their wedding but their lifelong marriage. Then we must back it up with quality marriage-support programs ranging from newly married ministry to marriage enrichment workshops, from Marriage Encounter to Retrouvaille for troubled marriages.

The church can reform itself; in some places it already has. But too often the welcome is weak, the meaning is in archaic language, or couples gave up on the church so long ago that it's hard to even find them.

Just as marriages need renewal to grow, so, too, does the church to be worthy of our founder. Jesus saw beyond the rules of his day and focused on the deeper needs of those who followed him, challenging some, feeding all. We could start by ditching the question "Why aren't you here?" and ask instead, "Where are you? And how can we help you get where you want to be?" Let's start listening to the cries of the young and the searching.

SUSAN VOGT is a freelance speaker and writer living in Covington, Kentucky. She is the author of Raising Kids Who Will Make a Difference (Loyola Press, 2002).