Marriage Mentoring Ministry

L.O.V.E. Marriage Mentoring is a peer ministry whereby married couples minister out of their own experience to engaged or first year married couples from our parish community. L.O.V.E. Mentoring involves active listening, deep sharing, empathy, compassion, and accompaniment.

It is wonderful you’ve decided to marry in the Catholic Church. Just as you’re about to commit your lives to each other forever, the Church is committed to your lifelong marriage. Our task is to prepare you for the journey of a lifetime, to accompany you through all the joys and the inevitable struggles of daily married life, and to show you what’s so unique and wonderful about Catholic Marriage. You deserve an extraordinary marriage – that’s what Catholic marriage is all about!

The Parish L.O.V.E Marriage Ministry serves its engaged and newlywed couples. A mentoring couple with a strong marriage gets together in a casual setting with either a betrothed or first year of marriage couple to socialize and support them, in an effort to help them to maintain a strong Christ-centered marriage. They will have access to get advice from people who have walked in their shoes. The mentoring couple can offer wisdom on how to overcome challenges that would otherwise prove to be barriers to a lasting union.

Marriage is certainly a gift from God, but that doesn’t mean it's without challenges, or that it is necessarily seen that way. Marriage is absolutely under attack. Everyone can use a little encouragement now and then, so if you are engaged to be married or are a newlywed start your marriage with support from L.O.V.E.

Call down your mercy on me and her and allow us to live together to a happy old age.
Book of Tobit 8:7b
 

For additional information regarding this ministry, contact Deacon Ed Sheffer at 520-577-8780, extension 111 or eMail him at [email protected]

Catholic Marriage is unique among other marital relationships because it is a sacrament that makes Christ present in our world. The relationship between husband and wife is meant to mirror the relationship of Jesus Christ for his people. Like the other sacraments, marriage is not just for the good of individuals, or the couple, but for the culture as a whole.  

In the Catholic tradition, husband and wife accept a role in God’s plan for humanity. They are ambassadors of God’s love, and they collaborate with God to keep humanity alive. The vows exchanged by the couple are a sacred pact through which the spouses embrace each other, and together embrace Jesus as their partner. Through there union with Christ, they participate in the unbreakable pact between God and humanity: the covenant that was sealed in the death and resurrection of Christ.

One of the many benefits of a sacramental marriage is the power of God’s grace, which helps couples keep their commitment and find happiness together.
 
Social scientists are finding that couples who recognize God’s presence in their relationship experience more satisfaction and are more likely to achieve lifelong marriage. All in all, couples who choose Catholic marriage receive many gifts – peace of heart, oneness with the Church, the fullness of the sacraments and God’s special blessing upon their marriage.

The art of mentoring is an age-old practice common to all cultures and founded on the basics of human relationships – we can learn from others who’ve mastered their craft - those who’ve successfully navigated the twists and turns, joys and struggles of marriage and family life. Through the process of mentoring, God uses married couples to bring Christ’s love to others. In this way, married couples become the living sign of God’s boundless love for humanity. This is what the Sacrament of Marriage is all about.

No matter how strong the marriage is, no married couple is meant to go it alone. As Catholics, we’re part of a loving, supportive parish community who share the same values, celebrate the joys of family life together, comfort one another in our sorrows, and receive the love-sustaining grace of the sacraments.

At its core, L.O.V.E Marriage Mentoring is focused on creating and sustaining authentic friendships between like-minded married couples—couples who are fully committed to living out their vows, nurturing and protecting their marriages and others’ marriages, through whatever challenge or crisis comes their way.

Our volunteer mentor couples are committed to spreading the Church’s truth on the Sacrament of Marriage. Our vision is that these stronger Sacramental Marriages, in turn, will create even stronger families, which will result in a stronger community.
 
Just as each child who is baptized in the Catholic faith has godparents, and each adult entering the Church through the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA) has a sponsor, we encourage all engaged couples to “walk with” an experienced married couple, along the path of preparation to enter marriage.  The mentor couple is intended to become the living connection to parish life for the engaged couple and or first year married couple. Engaged or first year couples are not just paired with a married couple arbitrarily. Couples are matched up based on several components, including personality compatibility. A relationship of trust is then developed as the experienced couple shares practical advice about how to make decisions and solve problems together. Mentors also models for the couple what it means to “be” the sacrament for each other, a model of sacrificial, self-giving love, but always in need of God’s grace to sustain them. In searching for just the right program to meet our needs, the Better Together Marriage Prep and Marriage Enrichment program from Dynamic Catholic has been selected because it has proven to mentor the engaged, and first year married couples. 

To begin the mentoring process, engaged couples will either be instructed to select a married couple L.O.V.E. Team Member they admire from their parish who meet the mentoring qualifications, or they will be matched with a couple in the parish who is already serves on this Team. This will happen early in the marriage preparation process that typically begins one year prior to the wedding date. Because the early years of marriage are so crucial to the stability and longevity of the marital relationship, the mentoring relationship that begins during the engagement period is designed to continue into the first years of marriage.   

“The parish is the place where experienced couples can help younger couples…
[they] can share some practical suggestions which they found useful: planning free time together, moments of recreation with the children, different ways of celebrating important events,
shared opportunities for spiritual growth.
Couples will gain from receiving help in facing crises, meeting challenges, and acknowledging
them as part of family life. Experienced and trained couples should be open to offering guidance,
so the couples will not be unnerved by these crises or tempted to hasty decisions."