Livonia — On a Friday night, Gerald and Dorothy Burke make their way out of the social hall at St. Edith Parish. A married couple for 55 years, they just finished having dinner with fellow parishioners and listening to a presentation on how to keep their marriage happy and healthy.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve done something like this,” says Gerald, who gives a smile as he calls theirs “a marriage made in heaven.”
Given five-and-a-half decades of personal experience in matrimony, they’re asked whether they might need to learn more about the sacrament and about each other.
“Maybe there’s something I can do yet” Dorothy adds.
At a time when society seems to be pulling away from traditional values, and some of the nation’s leading secular media outlets have openly questioned whether marriage is “obsolete,” Dorothy’s words seem to reflect the response given within the Catholic community — maybe there’s something it, as a Church, can do yet.
To that end, various parishes, organizations and other Catholic institutions have paid increasing attention to the marriages of their members in recent years, especially as marriage separation rates have soared. Many offer marriage enrichment nights, promote organizations that give retreats for married couples, and even offer more lighthearted, relationship-feeding programs such as “date nights” at the church hall.
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“More parishes are becoming attuned to those kinds of things, and some are very proactive on how they’re starting to develop them,” said David Grobbel, associate director for marriage and family life in the Archdiocese of Detroit. “They’re becoming a visible sign that they’re here to support couples on their journey of marriage.”
On the days surrounding St. Valentine’s Day, such programs are on full display. A collection of marriage-centered ministries locally, and even beyond the United States, in fact, acknowledge the second Sunday in February as World Marriage Day. And parishes – such as St. Edith – pack in dozens if not hundreds of married couples to give them evenings to reflect on the sacredness of their sacrament.
“Marriage is sacramental,” says Timothy Hogan, a family psychologist and director of Grace Counseling Center in Grosse Pointe who with his wife Karen gives informative talks on how couples can grow their marriages. “It’s a path to God. It really exposes our rough spots (so we can see) they’ve got to get smoothed out. I don’t think there’s a better personal growth path, even for the non-religious person.”
Hogan, who gave the presentation at St. Edith on Feb. 4 and who also will give a presentation at the World Marriage Day dinner at the San Marino Club in Troy on Feb. 13, says the failure rate of marriage in the past two decades has reached about 50 percent, and the fact that maintaining a healthy marriage can take a lot of work has caused some to want to dismiss it as an idea whose time has passed.
One of the images he uses in his presentation is the cover of Time Magazine from November 2010, which poses the question in red, bold letters: “Who needs marriage?”
Still, now isn’t the first time the institution of marriage has come under intense scrutiny, Hogan says.
“It’s always been a counter-cultural idea,” he says.
To make it work, he says, requires God’s grace — and as successful marriages succeed with the Lord’s help, society becomes the better for it.
“Good marriages are core to good families, and good families are core to a good society,” Hogan says. “It is the bedrock.”
Within the active Catholic community, Hogan’s sentiments aren’t uncommon.
Those involved in World Marriage Day invest healthy amounts of time helping other married couples to discover – anew or even for the very first time – the nature of the marital bond, and to realize it needs to be nourished.
“We take care of things that are of value to us in life,” says Linda Spranger, a St. Anastasia Parishioner who with her husband, Jay, help conduct programs for World Wide Marriage Encounter in the Detroit area. “We tune up our cars to help them run better. We maintain our homes. In certain jobs we need to keep up in our fields, so we take classes.
“This is something my husband and I do to feed our marriage, to keep it in tune… It’s important to continue to feed your relationship.”
A couple doesn’t need to be steeped in marriage-centered ministry, however, to continually invite God’s grace into their marriage.
A new lease on married life might come from something as simple as attending a series on marriage or couple prayer at a parish, or even a single night of reflection.
Our Lady of Sorrows parishioners Annette and Mike Semko, married for 30 years, seemed to have found some value at the St. Edith event.
“Looking at things from another perspective is a good idea,” says Annette, who said she appreciated the way the evening got her thinking about the genesis of their relationship. “You can get so involved in your daily routine — I haven’t thought about meeting Mike since I don’t know when.”
Also at the St. Edith event, Linda and Brian Bowser, parents of four, said a marriage enrichment night could do nothing but help, even if they are happy with their relationship as it is.
“We’ve been married happily for a long time, and we figured if there’s something to make it last and make it even better, why not?” Linda says.
Brian adds that a marriage enrichment night is not “a magic bullet” but rather is “another tool in the belt.”
Certainly such tools seem useful to build a strong Catholic community through stronger marriages. Central to it all, though, must be the architect of marriage itself, many Catholics maintain.
“Without God, I don’t think marriage is all that possible,” says Hogan.
He says, in his counseling profession, he’s told couples that they themselves have no hope of staying together — but Christ is the key that can offer them that hope.
“In Christ, there’s all kinds of hope,” he says.
So it becomes apparent: when it comes to marriage, there’s plenty the Church can do yet.
