Catholic marriage prep: We want the whole feast, please!

By Ava Lalor, OSV News

Even before my husband and I were engaged, we both looked forward to marriage preparation within the church.

For context, my husband and I both come from strong Catholic families and were both grounded in Catholic education. By the time we met (at our parish young adult group), we knew and believed what the church taught about marriage and were hungry to learn more.

That hunger manifested in a mutual eagerness to invest in resources to help our relationship and our faith lives grow and mature. We quickly embraced the "Ask Christopher West" podcast, which dove into theology of the body and answered real-life questions from Catholics of all walks of life and vocations.

In our marriage prep, we were hoping to go deeper. We didn't want the airy cotton candy offered by our culture when we understood that the Catholic Church had the full feast!

Sadly, while we did find what we were looking for, most of it did not come from our parish program.

Our parish uses a book-based program that, while true to the faith, didn't offer much that we already know. The videos accompanying the book were helpful; they offered the same information but introduced real couples sharing their experiences. This brought new perspective to the already-familiar material and inspired some good conversations, but -- as marriage prep -- it was a pretty thin broth.

Luckily, our parish paired us with a mentoring married couple as well. They'd had eight children in 15 years, and being around the kids was a true grace for my husband who, as an only child, needed to see what a large family can look like. The conversations with this couple were a gift, but (for me) they were bound to focus on the preparation book -- checking off all the main points -- while I often wished for the more practical "real-life" lessons that came when they shared their own stories and experiences.

At the suggestion of a few trusted couples, we bought two books to read during our engagement: "Three to Get Married" by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, now venerable, and "Holy Sex" by Gregory Popcak. Fulton Sheen's masterpiece guided us through reflections on the sanctity of marriage: how men and women bring unique gifts to a marriage; the importance of both motherhood and fatherhood; how marriage is an image of the Trinity. This fed our souls deeply when we weren't finding much to chew on elsewhere. The book provided by the parish could be skimmed through in mere minutes, so we intentionally read one chapter a week of "Three to Get Married," knowing that it deserved time to settle into our hearts. Popcak’s book furthered what we learned from Christopher and Wendy West, deepening our understanding of the theology of the body and what the church offers married couples.

In short, the best marriage prep we received came from trusted experts that we sought out ourselves. Purposely looking for what we knew we wanted and needed from our marriage preparation turned out to be crucially important, for us.

This isn't a full-out rejection of our parish marriage prep program, which gave the essential truths about the church and marriage. Many couples who are Catholic but largely unschooled in the faith, could certainly come to a fuller and more beautiful understanding of the sacrament through it. But most couples don't really know what they don’t know, as it were, or what they might really need in their marriage prep.

And most parish programs don't offer much to couples who already have a foundation in faith, and an idea of what part of the feast they would like to learn more about -- all the richer recipes, so to speak.

Pope Francis has called for a revamping of Catholic marriage preparation, suggesting that a lengthier, yearlong “marriage catechumenate” be drafted by the Dicastery for Laity, the Family and Life. That all needs to be hashed out -- for better and for worse, like marriage itself -- but as the church reimagines marriage prep, I would love for parishes to offer different levels of catechesis depending upon a couple's background, age and life experience. Most couples need to be ushered into the feast. But others, like us, have had to seek out its delicacies for ourselves, instead of being fed directly by our mother, the church.