Click Here to View the Catechumenal Pathways for Married Life from the Vatican
Marriage formation can be joyful and effective!
Explore the offerings below and reach out to the Office of Marriage and Family Life to consider how marriage formation can look at your parish.
The Office of Marriage and Family Life recommends Prepare/Enrich as the inventory with the greatest potential of helping couples grow in their relationship. This inventory is available in a Catholic version and comes with worksheets and discussion questions for each section of the inventory report.
Training in this inventory is provided through the Office of Marriage and Family Life. Please reach out with questions or to schedule your training.
This retreat model offers engaged couples a more intimate, community-building retreat experience with content that is used throughout the Diocese. The Office of Marriage and Family Life partners with you to train your team and provide logistical support, making this ministry more sustainable and consistent throughout the Diocese.
We have written a letter to you, explaining this new Pre-Cana model, as well as your other Pre-Cana options. Read it here, and check out a sample of our materials! If you would like to explore the possibility of bringing this ministry to your parish, please reach out to the Office of Marriage and Family Life.
Witness to Love is a virtues-based, Catechumenate model of marriage mentoring. What makes Witness to Love unique is that the engaged couple chooses their own mentor couple, whom they both admire. This mentor couple gives them a concrete connection and integration into the parish. Through the sharing of the mentor couples’ own marriage journey, the engaged couple inherits a “lifeline” of support in their commitment to Jesus and His Church. The mentors must meet some basic requirements and they are trained to mentor the engaged couple. Unlike other mentor models, there is no need to build trust in order for the marriage prep process to work – the trust already exists. Deep conversions, encounters with Christ, and renewal happen consistently for both the mentors and the engaged couple.
Have you heard about the Witness to Love diocesan pathway? If you do not have many weddings at your parish or the resources to begin a program like this, the Office of Marriage and Family Life offers a “diocesan pathway” to make this option available to your engaged couples. This pathway includes all the elements needed in marriage formation, and is facilitated by the Marriage Formation Coordinator in collaboration with you, the priest or deacon already accompanying the engaged couple.
The Office of Marriage and Family Life supports parishes in offering Spanish language marriage formation. A Spanish version of the Pre-Cana materials used in the diocese is available, and Prepare/Enrich and Witness to Love offer a Spanish version of their program as well.
We recommend that engaged couples who need online marriage prep take the following two courses together, as they offer different types of content:
One way to make this type of formation more impactful is to schedule a discussion with the engaged couple after they have completed these courses to unpack some of the experience together.
Remote and Proximate Marriage Formation
Marriage formation does not begin when a couple is engaged...it starts in the family and extends through young adulthood and the choice of a potential spouse. There are many opportunities throughout this time to prepare young people for the vocation of Marriage, especially through the witness of holy married couples in the community.
Can't find what you are looking for? Reach out to the Marriage and Family Life Office at [email protected].