Witness to Love is now flourishing in multiple languages in ninety dioceses in the United States, where it is touching tens of thousands of lives and strengthening countless marriages.
My latest for Word Among Us:
Ryan Verret says there is one thing he knows with complete certainty. “Marriage and family will save the world. I believe it.” He has reason to believe it. As the co-founder with his wife, Mary-Rose, of the groundbreaking marriage preparation program Witness to Love, he has seen firsthand the difference mentoring and catechesis can make in the lives of Catholic couples, especially those preparing to walk down the aisle.
“What’s different about our program,” he said during a recent Zoom call, “is that it’s an opportunity for the Holy Spirit to speak to the heart of an engaged couple.”
And it’s getting results. What started out as a three-hour brainstorming session, looking prayerfully for ways to rethink marriage prep, has become a phenomenon. Twelve years after it began in Lafayette, Louisiana, Witness to Love is now flourishing in multiple languages in ninety dioceses in the United States, where it is touching tens of thousands of lives and strengthening countless marriages.
“Pope John Paul II said that the family is the way of the Church,” Ryan explained. “It is our prayer that the Lord will use Witness to Love in some small way to build up the Church in the United States.” And they’re just getting started. More than a decade after it began, the organization could soon be having a global impact. Pope Francis recently named the Verrets as consultants to the Dicastery for Laity and Family Life at the Vatican, giving them the opportunity to share their insights and experience of Witness to Love with Church leaders from around the world.
Here’s how it works:
The organization’s website sums it up succinctly: “Witness to Love is a virtues-based, Catechumenate model of marriage renewal and preparation.” What that means: in Witness to Love, engaged couples select a mentor couple—people they may know, whose marriage they admire—and embark on a six-month program of discovering what it means to be a Catholic married couple.
“We came up with guidelines,” Mary-Rose explained. “Ryan and I form the parish leaders, who then coach and accompany the engaged couples and the mentors. The parish leaders are usually clergy or parish staff or volunteers who are involved in marriage formation.”
The mentor couples undergo their own training for the program. “They have a book that supplements the formation they do alongside the engaged couple,” Mary-Rose said. “They also attend the retreat that the engaged couple attends, and there’s a theology discussion night in the mentor couple’s home with the engaged couple and a priest. This is where some of the more personal or difficult subjects are addressed in a way that is very similar to the way Christ would sit down with someone in their home.”
And, she says, both the mentor couples and the engaged couples are enriched and transformed. “The transformation that takes place in the mentor couple’s marriage and spiritual lives has to do with the fact that they are being asked by a couple who admires them to share their marriage, to walk with them and to learn with them.” The mentors do all of the work that the engaged couples do and more. Because a lot of the mentors did little or no marriage prep themselves, they are also ripe for renewal and conversion.”
