With mentors and the Holy Spirit, marriage catechumenate model bears fruit

(OSV News) -- When Pope Francis approved the December 2023 appointment of Mary-Rose and Ryan Verret as consultors to the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life -- the Vatican office tasked with promoting the pastoral care of marriage and the family -- the Louisiana couple's initial range of reactions to the announcement included astonishment.

But given the nationwide success of the Witness to Love marriage formation and renewal nonprofit ministry -- co-founded by the Verrets a dozen years ago, and now found in 87 dioceses, 510 parishes, serving close to 7,200 couples and their mentors each year -- it's really not a surprise.

And there are numbers to prove it.

Traditional marriage preparation programs, the Verrets told OSV News, have a divorce rate of 23% for Catholic couples at the five-year mark of marriage. It's a statistic little different from that of the general population, which stands at 25%.

"If grace is effective and if grace is real," said Mary-Rose, "that's not the statistic it's going to have."

The Witness to Love model is distinctly different from other and older models of marriage preparation.

Such programs do fill a need, the Verrets said, but they question their effectiveness as an option of first resort.

"You might go to a one-day conference. You might have a mentor couple assigned to you, if the parish hasn't run through all the ones they have. And you might have a few meetings with Father or Deacon, if he has the time," explained Mary-Rose.

"But that's not sufficient," she continued, "and that's why Pope Francis calls for the marriage catechumenate."

Pope Francis oversaw the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life's 2022 release of "Catechumenal Pathways for Married Life: Pastoral Guidelines for Local Churches," a pastoral outline for preparing engaged couples for the sacrament of matrimony through a marriage catechumenate.

In many ways, it resembles Witness to Love.

The Witness to Love approach challenges couples to engage with church teaching and what being married means. It also involves close accompaniment by a practicing Catholic mentor couple -- of their own choosing -- who shares the couple's journey to the altar and provides them a "lifeline" of support beyond the wedding day.

Ryan unsparingly praises "these thousands of mentor couples who have opened up their homes to wandering, seeking, millennial couples who are trying to see: What does Christian marriage and a Catholic home actually look like?"

"The solution," he said, "is really so simple. God did not wire us that you need to have a Ph.D. in theology for grace to be efficacious in your life. What it does hinge on is authentic friendship."

The Witness to Love model of parish community integration yields impressive results: a 6% divorce rate for Witness to Love couples at the five-year mark, with a 70% increase in church attendance among Witness to Love newlyweds.

"The training we offer is for the parish leadership," said Mary-Rose. "How to walk with couples; how to form couples; how to integrate them into the church community; how to connect them to other couples; how to introduce them to Jesus."

But that's not all.

"And," she continued, "it's training in evangelization, theology, psychology, parish best practices, technology. How do we use all the amazing resources and insights that we have at our fingertips, to serve the sacrament of marriage in a way that will bring couples to Jesus?"

That discipleship component, said Ryan, is essential.

"When the apostolic activity of the church connects with those who need to hear it, if it's not an authentic model for discipleship, then what is it?" he asked. "I think that's what Witness to Love and the marriage catechumenate is about: Where is the experience of discipleship, so you are actually being formed -- not just intellectually; not just passing a test -- but where is the desire being formed?"

The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate -- the Georgetown University-affiliated research center that conducts studies about the Catholic Church -- notes that in 1965, marriages in the church in a previous year numbered 347,179. In 2023, the figure was 111,245.

A 2015 Pew Research Center poll found that only two-thirds of Catholics (68%) married civilly were wed in the Catholic Church.

Catholic marriages obviously need help -- and Witness to Love is designed to provide the robust accompaniment that can equip couples with the tools to both discern marriage, and to stay married.

"Couples coming in for marriage today are actually, I think, facing different challenges than people even 20 to 30 years ago were facing," said Jodi Todd, coordinator of marriage formation at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Tyler, Texas.

Todd cites the rise of social media and fragmented family schedules as factors -- but the model Witness to Love offers has nonetheless had visible results.

"The engaged couples -- as they're getting married -- they're more likely to keep coming to Mass. They know people now," Todd shared.

Prior to offering the Witness to Love program, "we were seeing kind of a frustrating amount of people getting married -- we're giving them all this truth; we're telling them everything -- and then they wouldn't show up at Mass," Todd recalled. "I would say that has actually really decreased. ... They're coming to Mass more."

"I do feel," Todd concluded, "like we're seeing everything that Witness to Love promised working in our parish."

Bishop Donald J. Hying of Madison, Wisconsin, has also seen the fruit of Witness to Love.

"We've implemented it in a great percentage of our parishes, to wonderful impact," said Bishop Hying, whose diocese includes 102 parishes in the 11-county area of southwestern Wisconsin. "So I think our engaged couples that have participated in it would say it's prepared them well for marriage, and brought them into deeper engagement with the church."

The newlywed/married mentors component is, Bishop Hying confirmed, vital.

"There's really a mutual benefit for both of the couples," he explained. "And our priests are very happy with it. It really has transformed our marriage process. ... Witness to Love has really become our normative way of doing marriage prep."

While involving mentor couples lightens a priest or deacon's workload, it's also a change for some parishes.

"It's a little difficult at first because pastors are like, 'What do you mean they picked their own mentor couple?'" said Stacy Golden, director of the Office of Family, Youth and Young Adult Ministry in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

Prior to her current role, Golden was director of evangelization at a parish that was among the first in the Archdiocese of Baltimore to adopt Witness to Love.

"The biggest thing here is to let the Holy Spirit guide and not to try to micromanage mentor couples," she advised. "Even though it may seem like you don't have enough control, if you go with something like this -- a more evangelizing model -- I would say that God is always in control. So get out of the way of the Holy Spirit, and let the Lord work."

Father Dan Tracy, associate pastor of St. Patrick Parish in Hudson, Wisconsin, told OSV News Witness to Love is a potential antidote to the discouraging state of Catholic marriages.

"It's really easy to look at the declining marriage numbers and just say, 'Let's put our efforts elsewhere.' Ryan and Mary-Rose -- and other people I've met who've been involved with Witness to Love -- have taken the complete opposite approach. This is actually where we need to be putting more time and energy."

While St. Patrick has only been using Witness to Love since January 2024, Father Tracy is encouraged, and has seen "positive signs" in the couples it has served.

"Couples that I don't think would have been in relationship with our parish -- and maybe wouldn't even be regular Mass attendees -- are."