Looking past 'I do' - Denver Archdiocese a pacesetter

In a room littered with pizza boxes, fried chicken and soda cans, David Walker asked 30 couples to stand and make an unusual declaration of love.

"I want you to turn to your future wife and say, 'It's my job to make sure you get to heaven.' "

The couples grasped each other's hands and whispered the promise, but Walker was only half done: "Now, it's the ladies' turn . . . "

And after the hushed whispers faded, Walker added, "Now that's what sacramental marriage is all about. Aw, give each other a kiss."

"I wasn't expecting that," said Cindy Crook, a non-Catholic who last May was attending her first marriage preparation class sponsored by the Archdiocese of Denver.

"But then," she added, "there were a lot of things we didn't expect that we were asked to do."

Expect the unexpected at the Archdiocese of Denver. It's become a national pacesetter in developing a comprehensive Catholic "marriage prep" course, which is mandatory for the 1,500 to 2,000 couples who wed each year in the archdiocese.

"Many dioceses contact us on a regular basis to get programs like ours," said Walker, 28, the archdiocese's head of the office of marriage and family life.

This year, the Denver model may be looked at even more closely because marriage preparation is going under the microscope.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is launching a major initiative in an effort to stack the odds in favor of lasting marriage. They're starting with a series of focus groups with married couples in 100 volunteer dioceses - including Denver - to determine how the church can better equip couples for a life together.

"When I was married 30 years ago, we met once with a priest to fill out paperwork. No one ever sat down to explain what it means to be married sacramentally and to be open to life," recalled Sheila Garcia, associate director of the bishops' Family, Laity, Women and Youth office in Washington, D.C.

"The marriage rate is declining, the rate of people being married in the Catholic Church has declined noticeably," Garcia said.

"We still have a high divorce rate in this country, and something approaching half the couples who seek to get married in the church are already living together.

Among Catholics, she said, the divorce rate stands at 21 percent, nearly as alarming as the 25 percent rate for most mainline Protestant denominations and the nation at large.

The Catholic Church teaches that marriage is an indissoluble sacrament, a union ordained by God that can't be broken until death. Catholics who divorce cannot remarry in the church without obtaining a church-sanctioned annulment.

Basically, an annulment is a declaration that the couple went into the marriage without fulfilling the requirements of the sacred, permanent bond that God intended.

Two of the more common grounds for annulment could involve the contention that the marriage was entered into as more of a romantic fling than a lifelong commitment or there was a resistance to having children.

Annulments have become a sore spot in the church. Critics charge they're little more than a "Catholic divorce" because, if obtained, the divorcees are free to pursue Catholic marriage.

One Vatican department called the 60,000 annulments granted in the U.S. church every year "a grave scandal." Others contend annulment is a natural consequence of a culture that doesn't value marriage and gives little thought to marriage preparation.

It's no wonder, then, that the U.S. bishops want to strengthen pre-marriage counseling.

A good marriage preparation course, the thinking goes, can alert couples before they make missteps.

"We're saying to couples, 'We want you to be aware of what you signed up for - there are some deep spiritual realities in marriage and we want to make sure you're educated,' " said Walker, a 28-year-old Baptist convert who's been heading Denver's marriage and family office since last year.

The Denver archdiocese has developed a three-pronged program that begins six to eight months before the wedding.

It starts with "God's Plan for a Joy-Filled Marriage," a one-day overview of Catholic teaching on marriage.

Walker challenges couples to see beyond the cultural notion of sex as a sport with multiple partners, and understand it as "the definitive expression of commitment" in marriage.

"There's a lot of confusion out there, guys," Walker told the couples gathered last May for their first session. "The Catholic Church isn't down on sex; it's holy and sacred, which is why the church exalts it so much."

The couples also take "skill-building" classes, which address issues like finances and communication, "conflict resolution" and in-laws.

But the centerpiece of Denver's program - and the one that catches couples by surprise - is natural family planning, which teaches techniques to monitor a woman's fertility. Couples learn to track a woman's temperature and other physiological changes to space pregnancies without using church-condemned artificial birth control.

Denver is one of only a handful of the nation's 195 dioceses to require couples to complete a series of NFP classes before they can marry. Most dioceses just refer couples to NFP counselors, with varying degrees of follow-up.

The Denver archdiocese believes it has a moral duty to provide adequate teaching, Walker said.

"If the church is going to teach that artificial birth control is immoral then she has a responsibility to give couples an alternative," Walker said.

NFP, couples are told, makes sex what it's meant to be in marriage - a total commitment shared by both spouses that's not blocked by chemicals or barriers.

Intimacy is deepened because spouses must communicate daily about a woman's fertile times, Walker said, adding that NFP had cured "the immaturity and selfishness" he felt he had brought into his own marriage with his wife, Barbie.

Those are startling ideas to couples schooled in a contraceptive culture. And many are abashed by the clinical frankness of the course, which doesn't hedge on the details of a woman's reproductive biology.

"Right when we sit down, they're talking about mucus and every guy's jaw has dropped," chuckled Kathleen Sullivan, 28, a marketing director who is scheduled to marry Steve Charles today."Steve turned to me and said, 'Do I look as freaked out as everyone else?' "

"All the guys were pretty shocked," said Charles, 31, who's studying to be a special education teacher. But after learning the system, "we're planning to use it. We really think the pill is bad for health reasons and this is more natural."

Not everyone wants to hear what the church has to say. A few couples at last May's session, who said they weren't religious, expressed some resentment at having to be there.

As one woman's future husband went for food during the lunch break, she declined an interview saying apologetically, "He doesn't want to be here anyway, so I'm sure he won't want to talk to you."

Three couples who did talk reflected different complexities of modern marriage - divorce, cohabitation, mixed religions. All said they were changed by what they learned.

Ewelina Rowinska, 29, was vacationing in Denver from her native Poland when she met and fell in love with William Rimbey, 34, who's gone back to school to study business.

The problem: Rimbey was married twice before by justices of the peace, and had to seek not one, but two annulments before they could marry in the Catholic Church.

"It was long," Rimbey said of the process. "I had to track down both (ex-wives)."

In the meantime, the Rimbeys wed in a civil ceremony and subsequently had a son, Tommy. But they felt something still was missing.

"I have a very strong Catholic background," said Ewelina Rimbey, an environmental engineer, "and for me getting married by a justice of the peace is official, but getting married in the church is spiritual."

With guidance from their parish, the final go-ahead came came through late in 2004 and the Rimbeys wed in the Catholic Church in August.

They linked the sacrament with an old Polish custom - a special Mass for their child on his first birthday.

Cindy Crook, 25, and Ryan Jeannelle, 26, dated briefly in high school and met again in 2002. Before they married last Saturday, they lived together and raised her son, Tyler, from a previous relationship.

For Crook, an office manager, and her husband, who manages a grocery store, raising a child made the church grow in importance for them. Jeannelle had left the Catholic Church in the 8th grade, "but now we've been going to Mass every Sunday."

Living together is a vexing cultural issue for the Catholic Church. A 1999 bishops' study concluded nearly half the couples who begin marriage preparation are in a live-in relationship.

The bishops suggest that the priest or deacon - who must meet with the couple before any marriage preparation can begin - be neither harsh nor indifferent about living together. Rather, they should provide "general correction with understanding and compassion."

Jeannelle said he and Crook were persuaded to change their lifestyle because of their priest's encouragement and information he gave them that points to a high divorce rate among cohabitating couples.

They also were inspired by what they learned in the courses about the depth of a full marriage commitment.

"It just hit home and we both shed tears," Jeannelle said, adding that the church's marriage courses they took this summer persuaded them to abstain from sex until their wedding.

Couples also dive into issues such as finances, communication and children, and take a comprehensive test to assess how much they know about each other's views on these important subjects.

Steve Charles, raised as a nondenominational Protestant, said he had to overcome his view of Catholicism as a religion of "smelly incense and special robes and bells." At first, he was suspicious of its marriage preparation courses.

Charles and his bride, Sullivan, are creating an international merger of families from the United States and Australia.

They found that discussing how they'll coordinate holidays and handle family issues long-range was more helpful than they imagined.

"I was a little bit concerned but the priest was honest about what (the test) was used for," Charles said. "If we didn't agree on something we could talk about it."

To his surprise, Charles said, the process also unearthed some undiscussed issues: "We both wanted kids, but it just didn't come up about the specific number and about discipline."

Such details - what works and what doesn't in marriage prep - will be the stuff of the focus groups organized this fall.

Later, probably in 2008, the bishops will pull those findings into a pastoral guide on Catholic marriage. What it will look like is anybody's guess at this point, but Garcia said the intent is to go beyond just dwelling on the negatives, like divorce.

"We want people to have happy and healthy marriages," Garcia said. "An enduring marriage should mean more than just a test of endurance."

As the varied situations of the couples in the article show, taking marriage and family seriously these days is going against the grain, even for people who profess to be Catholic.

This was my favorite off-the-wall line:

A few couples at last May's session, who said they weren't religious, expressed some resentment at having to be there.

What, they just thought the Catholic Church would be a good backdrop for their wedding pictures?

What, they just thought the Catholic Church would be a good backdrop for their wedding pictures?

Yep. Seems about right. My wife and I do marriage-prep sessions with couples from our parish. Last year, our priest agreed to a request from a couple who planned to marry in a Catholic parish in another state but wanted to do their marriage-prep sessions here. The couple were already shacking up and kept postponing the dates for getting together to discuss marriage plans. Finally, the woman called me and said, "Well, we decided we'd just forget about the church part and get somebody to marry us down on the beach. We don't need any preparation for that." I told her she was probably right on that point.

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