2 - My Journey from Pre Cana to Engaged Encounter to Sponsor Couple ® Ministry.

THE EVOLUTION OF SPONSOR COUPLE ® MINISTRY by Rob Ruhnke [8-29-2024] 

IN THE 1940s, MARRIAGE PREPARATION BECAME A SERIOUS PASTORAL NEED.

The destabilization of marriage and family life as a result of World War I & World War II resulted in an alarming increase in the Catholic divorce rate that could no longer be denied or ignored.   Parish priests were doing their best to assist couples with some kind of “marriage preparation” which was called PRE CANA, and Catholics began to accept these efforts as a normal part of Catholic life.

In the 1970s, the divorce rate was continuing to rise rather than come down.  Many dioceses established Diocesan Family Life Offices to address this growing pastoral need.  I was serving as the Diocesan Family Life Director in Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston and communicating with Family Life Directors across the USA and Canada.  These conversations confirmed that our best efforts to provide enough Pre Cana sessions were failing to meet the pastoral need because ~ in large dioceses like Galveston-Houston TX  ~ we always had too many couples wanting to take part in the PRE CANA sessions and too few “experts” and married couples to adequately staff the Sunday afternoon Pre Cana programs for as many as 300 couples!  We had not yet learned enough to know that our Pre Cana efforts ~ based on educational theory lifted from the school classroom model ~ were mostly ineffective in dealing with engaged couples.  In school, teachers lecture and the students know they will be graded on their ability to articulate what their teachers taught.  Pre Cana leaders expected engaged couples to ~ not only remember  ~ but also put into practice what they heard at Pre Cana.  But there was never any scientific research to measure how well couples were putting into practice what they heard at Pre Cana.  We leadership folks were not opposed to doing research about this, we simply did not have the time and money to learn how this could be done.

Then something happened that we did not anticipate.  MARRIAGE ENCOUNTER ~ a lay led movement developed in Spain ~ came to the USA and soon evolved into Worldwide Marriage Encounter.  The Marriage Encounter weekend retreat was led by minimally trained married couples willing to share personal experience of learning to practice “Daily Dialogue” as a way of sustaining the “intimate partnership of married life and love[1]” that is the heart of their marriage.  I got involved in Marriage Encounter because I hoped it could help me re-think and re-design a better way to do marriage preparation.

It did!  In 1974, involvement in Marriage Encounter led to the creation of our diocesan ENGAGED ENCOUNTER (we were the 3rd diocese in the USA to do this).  Our Plan was that “Daily Dialogue” would be taught to those preparing for marriage.  This “Daily Dialogue” would be the primary skill that couples would use to establish & sustain the “intimate partnership of married life and love” that was the foundation of their marriage and family life. 

In 1975, our Family Life Office believed that Engaged Encounter was the best possible marriage preparation program.  However, we knew that we could never offer enough of these weekends to meet the needs of all the parishes in the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston TX.  We experimented with the “Sponsor Couple” model invented by Msgr. Ed Carmody, the Family Life Director in the Archdiocese of San Antonio TX.  Our Plan was to make the SPONSOR COUPLE program an effective “backup” that could accommodate the couples we could not “fit” into the Engaged Encounter weekends. 

How did that Plan work out?  UNEXPECTEDLY, we soon learned that the SPONSOR COUPLE program was BETTER than the ENGAGED ENCOUNTER.  Why?

1 - The SPONSOR COUPLE ® program provided the answer to how marriage preparation could be done in the parishes of the diocese by training members of the parish to serve as sponsor couples.  Canon Law (Canons 1063 & 1064) had been calling for this since 1983.

2 - How could we accomplish the necessary Training for all the parishes of the archdiocese?  It took years of experimenting with the design of the Workbooks and the process of Training sponsor couples.  Fortunately, we managed to keep up with the requests for Training that came to us from pastors.  At this point in time, we are confident that….

• The For Better & For Ever ® Workbooks and the website (www.marriage preparation.com) contain all the appropriate content that needs to be learned.  The engaged couple and the sponsor couple use these to do their Homework and dialogue. Sponsor couples are trained to continue their accompaniment beyond the wedding into the early years of the marriage and family life of the newly married couple.
   
• The process of Training[2] was radically changed ~ for the better ~ when Covid-19 ended all face to face meetings.  We learned to do the Training on Zoom.  That decision makes possible to offer Training to every parish in the world!  It has worked so well that we will never go back to face-to-face training. 
   

3 – The result is that we have made it possible for “poor[3]” parishes and “rich” parishes to provide high quality ministry for those preparing for the VOCATION of Matrimony.  In addition, the expenses of using Retreat Houses and diocesan & parish facilities is eliminated since the meetings take place in the homes of the Sponsor Couples (or on Zoom if they live in different cities).

To this point in 2024, For Better & For Ever ® has been gathering feedback from Sponsor Couples and married couples who met with Sponsor Couples.  We think the most significant feedback is from Sponsor Couples who tell us: “Serving as a Sponsor Couple has been a consistent experience of making our own marriage better….that is why we continue to serve as a Sponsor Couple.”  For Better & For Ever ® is working on a plan to collaborate with diocesan Family Life Offices to achieve scientific evaluation of marriage preparation programs.