Lovers’ leap of faith New guidelines seek to strengthen marriage

By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

As Valentine’s Day approaches, men and women across the United States are ordering flowers, buying candy and making dinner reservations. Some Catholic parishes will get into the act, sponsoring their own celebrations of married love on a day that has become amostly secular event.

But marriage isn’t always about candy, flowers and romance. Sometimes it’s about dealing with a leaky ceiling in the middle of the night or coping with a partner’s serious illness. For Catholics, it is always about reflecting Christ’s love to one another and showing that love to the world. That’s the message that marriage ministry leaders in the Archdiocese of Chicago want to spread with the publication of “In the Spirit of Cana: Guidelines for Pastoral Outreach ion to Christian Marriage.”

“Essentially, our hope is to reclaim marriage as a religious institution that serves society as a whole, a vocation that shapes the lives of all who are called,” said Andrew Lyke, the archdiocese’s coordinator of marriage ministry. “And we all benefit from it.”

The new guidelines address teaching about marriage from a child’s earliest formation in faith through marriage preparation, the celebration of weddings and “continuing education” for married couples. When they go into effect in July, they will replace marriage preparation guidelines last updated in 1979, said Frank Hannigan, director of the Office for Family Ministries. Those would have been the guidelines in force when Crystal and Kevin Sullivan, members of St. Joseph Parish in Libertyville, were married 20 years ago. Now, after 10 years leading Marriage Encounter weekends and several years serving as PreCana leaders and facilitators for the FOCCUS “premarital inventory,” they come at the whole notion of marriage with a more mature view. “Before the wedding, it’s all about compatibility,” said Kevin Sullivan. “After the wedding, it’s all about dealing with differences. And everybody has differences.” FOCCUS (Facilitating Open Couple Communication Understanding Study) asks couples to answer 156 questions in 19 areas to help discover where their differences lie. After completing the assessment, the couples meet with the facilitators to talk about what issues they might face and how they will handle them. Encouraging nearly all engaged couples to do the FOCCUS assessment is one of the biggest practical changes in the marriage ministry guidelines. The other is asking newlyweds to attend two “continuing education” workshops called “First Years and Forever” in the year after the wedding. In a broader context, the guidelines call on parishes to teach all members about the theological meaning of marriage, and to be places of welcome and support for engaged couples and newlyweds alike. The guidelines have been under development since 1999, and they are being introduced at a series of vicariate meetings. They come at a time when fewer people are marrying, and of those that do, fewer are marrying in the church. Thirty-five percent of first marriages end in divorce, as do 70 percent of remarriages. “Marriage and family are a big part of the future of the church,” said Toni Pepping, a pastoral associate at St. Joseph Parish in Libertyville. “This is one area where we try to counteract the culture so prevalent today, the culture of division. We need to support people where it really matters, in day-to-day relationships. That’s how we reflect God to them.”

Some parishes, including St. Joseph, have been using FOCCUS for years. Others only recently started, or have yet to begin. Deacon Ray Doud at Church of the Holy Spirit in Schaumburg is a recent convert to the use of the assessment tool. “I think it can be very helpful to the couple,” said Doud, a pastoral associate. “It can give them the opportunity to enter into a conversation about some of things that are hard to talk about, and it can help them understand that they don’t know everything about each other.”

Those who help couples with FOCCUS stress that it is not a test, there are no wrong answers and there is no failing score. “They’re all concerned about how they did,” Crystal Sullivan said. “They do see it a little bit as a pass-fail,” Kevin Sullivan agreed. “We have to do a lot of reassuring about that,” Crystal added. “There is no right or wrong answers,” said Pepping. “There are just challenges. We try to impart some new strategies because there are things they are going to have to deal with.”

If the issues aren’t dealt with, they can become the wedges that drive spouses apart, Hannigan said. Many couples who split up do so within the first five years, he said, and many people report that they knew their marriages were in trouble within months of the wedding, or even before the ceremony. If people are not going to be able to make it work, it’s better for them to find out before they marry, Doud said. “If the statistics are accurate, a significant number of couples having gone through FOCCUS decide to delay or postpone the marriage,” he said. “That’s why it’s my intention to use it early.”
The Sullivans, who have led about a half dozen couple through the assessment in the past two years, say none have decided to delay or call off their weddings, but some needed more sessions than others to talk about all their differences. Sometimes the members of the couple don’t even agree on whether they have talked about a topic, the Sullivans said. Common topics that need discussion are religion and sex. Facilitators like the Sullivans can help by keeping the discussion calm, respectful and focused on the issues at hand. They can also show that even couples married for years still disagree. “We’ll share stories about times in our marriage when we had to work at it,” Crystal Sullivan said. “It’s a continuing process of working to understand each other, of talking things through and not assuming you know what the other person thinks.”

“First Years and Forever” aims to help the couple use those strategies to work through the issues that crop up after the wedding, Hannigan said. “There are some things you just don’t know about until you’re there,” he said, whether it’s different expectations about how much time you spend at the in-laws to who cooks and does the dishes. The two workshops give couples a chance to talk about the issues that often drive a wedge between couples: one on expectations, adjustments and time, and another on faith, sex and money. The topics were chosen based on the results of a survey by Creighton University about why marriages break up in their early years. The “First Years and Forever” workshops have been going for about two years, although with sparse attendance. They seem to attract couples who are still madly in love and draped all over each other, Hannigan said, or those who have started to experience serious conflicts and want to find a way to work them out. Rebecca Hirsch of Wauconda falls somewhere in between. Hirsch, who is Catholic, and her husband, Jonathan, who is Jewish, signed up in part because they had such a good experience at the Engaged Encounter marriage preparation weekend they attended in the Northwest suburbs. They married in a Catholic ceremony with elements of Jewish tradition in Rebecca Hirsch’s hometown of Omaha, Neb., in September, 2003. After buying a house in Wauconda, Hirsch said, she and her husband were looking for a way to connect with other newlyweds who were going through the same issues they were. They attended a session presented by the Sullivans in Libertyville. It was good as far as it went, Hirsch said, but they were disappointed to find only one other couple there. Hirsch, a public relations professional, thinks the program might be more attractive if it borrowed some of the social focus of the successful “Theology on Tap” program for young adults. That way, young couples who don’t have kids—and the natural meeting grounds of storytimes and playgrounds—would have a way to connect. “It would be nice if we had other couple friends who would go out with us,” she said. Even so, the Hirsches represent a victory of sorts for marriage ministers who are trying to get newlyweds to give “First Years and Forever” a try. Unlike PreCana and FOCCUS, there’s no wedding at the end of the program to serve as an incentive to go. It’s a matter of changing expectations, Hannigan said. The Archdiocese of Chicago has been doing marriage preparation for the last 60 years, and it’s only been in the last generation that couples have looked at it as a matter of course, something that they understand everyone should do, he said. For Pepping, who first got involved in marriage ministry by leading PreCana sessions with her husband, just inviting new couples back to the church is progress. “I see a value even if they don’t choose to do it,” she said. “At least they’ve been invited. You can’t force them into continuing education. If we make marriage preparation the best it can be for them, why wouldn’t they choose to go on and have another good experience?”

Offering the program also helps the church demonstrate that marriage is the sacrament, not the wedding, the Sullivans said. “So much focus is put on the wedding,” said Kevin Sullivan,. “But matrimony is a daily sacrament. Every day is an opportunity to be Christ for your spouse, and for your spouse to be Christ to you.”

For more information about “In the Spirit of Cana,” call the Family Ministries Office at (312) 751-8351 or visit www.inthespiritofcana.org.