Marriage Preporation
Congratulations! As a couple, you decided to enter into the beautiful Sacrament of Matrimony. Be sure to begin your engagement in prayer and continue to pray to ask the Lord’s guidance as you plan your wedding day and your future life together. Holy Cross, along with the Diocese of Venice, uses the Marriage Preparation Program Witness to Love.
What is Witness to Love?
Witness to Love is a virtues-based, Catechumenate model of marriage renewal and preparation that integrates modern principles of psychology and the virtues to help couples facilitate an authentic dialogue about their relationship.
What makes Witness to Love different?
What makes Witness to Love unique is that the engaged couple chooses their own mentor couple. This is a couple they both admire and see as a source of faith formation. 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 happens consistently for both the mentors and the engaged couple.
“Before this program, we did not have a full understanding of how Christ and a marriage worked hand in hand. Now through the the readings in the workbook and discussions with our mentors, we understand that that the love that Christ has for his church(Bride) should imitate the love a husband and wife have for their marriage and for Christ.”
Guiseppe & Katelyn, Witness to Love Engaged Couple (National Shrine of the Little Flower Basilica Archdiocese of Detroit Michigan
(941)729-3891