Dating - Knights of Columbus, Supreme Council

premarital sex, tempts one toward it. For these reasons, it is
argued that dating is wrong.
It might be easy to dismiss these individuals as curmudgeons,
but they allude to a reality often glossed over in the more
romantic notions of dating. Violence often accompanies dating.
65% of people experience emotional, verbal, or physical violence
in dating relationships. More than a third of dating relationships
in college have incidences of nonsexual dating violence.
This violence is overwhelmingly directed toward women, who
make up 85% of the victims of dating violence. In colleges, 67%
of all sexual assaults are cases of date rape, with 94% of the
perpetrators being male. In fact, date rape is the most commonly
reported crime on college campuses. Rape is more common at
private colleges and major universities than in society at large.
(Institutions with a religious affiliation, however, have rates
lower than the national average.) 4
Such violence deserves the strongest condemnation, and the
Catholic Church provides a the foundation necessary to
completely reject this destructive behavior. Given Catholicism’s
devotion to the Blessed Mother, its upholding of the dignity and
vocation of women, 5 its insistence on the procreative and unitive
value of sex, 6 and its uncompromising pro-life stance that abhors
violence directed at other people, the troubling reality that these
rape and violence statistics suggest is obviously incompatible
with the practice of the Faith.
Dating is wonderful. This understanding of dating is more
widespread and common. It is the one most people have when
entering into relationships and is the one most often portrayed in
books, television shows and movies. Like the understanding of
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