Requirements
Engaged couples who want be married here at Guardian Angels must start the formation process at least six months prior to their wedding date.
Marriage preparation includes attending the Covenant Couples Program sponsored by Guardian Angels Parish. In addition to the Covenant Couples Program, couples are also required to take the PREPARE/ENRICH Compatibility Tool.
This is a program for couples who would like to reflect on their relationship in a more private setting. Couples meet with a Marriage Educator and complete a series of questions designed to help the couple obtain a greater sense of each other’s needs, expectations and responsibilities. A sacramental marriage is the very same thing only between two baptised persons, which raises the dignity of the marriage to being a sacrament and a witness to the unity of Jesus with the Church. Since it is a liturgical act (an official act of the Catholic faith community), the wedding of a sacramental marriage is to take place in a church in the presence of a priest and two witnesses. The Sacrament of Marriage is a covenant, which is more than a contract.Covenant always expresses a relationship between persons. The marriage covenant refers to the relationship between the husband and wife, a permanent union of persons capable of knowing and loving each other and God. Marriage is a beautiful sacrament, but it is also a great responsibility. The couple is committing to a lifetime of self-giving love to one another. This is only possible through the grace of God. Before entering into marriage, couples should receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation shortly before the Wedding Day.
Covenant Couples Registration Form
How to Begin The Process
The process for couples wishing to be married begins by registering in the parish and reading through the Guardian Angels Marriage Guidelines. The marriage guidelines can be picked up at the parish office or downloaded from the link listed below. After reading through the marriage guidelines, the couple can call our Pastoral Associate, Mr. Steve Petty @ 248-588-1222, to set up an appointment. Mr. Petty can also be reached via email at stevep@guardiana.com.
Marriage Guidelines
“The marriage covenant, by which a man and a woman form with each other an intimate communion of life and love, has been founded and endowed with its own special laws by the Creator. By its very nature, it is ordered to the good of the couple, as well as to the generation and education of children. Starsat update. Christ the Lord raised marriage between the baptized to the dignity of a sacrament.”
Catechism of the Catholic Church
Paragraph 1660
“The Christian home is the place where children receive the first proclamation of the faith. For this reason, the family home is rightly called “the domestic church,” a community of grace and prayer, a school of human virtues and of Christian charity.”
Catechism of the Catholic Church
Paragraph 1666
Witness to Love, a Catholic marriage preparation and renewal ministry, is launching a new program to prepare civilly married couples to enter into sacramental marriages in the Catholic Church.
Mary-Rose Verret, who co-founded Witness to Love with her husband, Ryan, said her ministry’s new initiative, which was announced ahead of National Marriage Week, is the first national program in the Church that is geared specifically for civilly married couples.
“The Church has never made a concerted effort in this area, which is shocking,” Verret told Our Sunday Visitor. She added that working with civilly married couples who have gone through the Witness to Love program over the last seven years has been a “highlight” of her ministry.
“They’ve changed our marriage. They’ve inspired us,” Verret said. “The civilly married couples, we do nothing for them, but they are the hidden gems in the Church.”
Over the last year, the Verrets worked with couples who were civilly married before having their marriages convalidated and several diocesan marriage preparation leaders to tweak the Witness to Love program for civilly married couples who want to prepare for sacramental marriage. The new program is being piloted in 16 parishes across the country.
“We recorded new video content where the couples tell their witness stories about how God worked in their lives, and it is very powerful,” Verret said.
Forgetting the graces
Catholic marriage preparation leaders across the United States told OSV that a new approach is needed because in recent years they have been seeing more civilly married couples in their marriage preparation programs.
“We have seen a profound difference in the makeup of the couples today than from when we began 19 years ago,” said Steve Beirne, who along with his wife coordinates his parish’s marriage preparation program in Portland, Maine.
There are many reasons why more Catholic couples are getting married first outside the Church. Young Catholics, especially those who don’t attend Mass regularly, in general do not feel the same pressure they once did to get married in the Church. Others may simply not understand the graces available to them in a sacramental marriage. Many are opting for outdoor wedding ceremonies on a beach or garden, or they decide to exchange wedding vows at the same facility where they celebrate the reception.
“The wedding industry makes you feel guilty if you make your people go to the church. They’re marketing geniuses,” said Peg Hensler, the associate director of Marriage Ministries and NFP for the Diocese of Trenton, New Jersey.
“The truth is we have so much more to offer these couples, especially when there is a beautiful Church wedding, and what a difference a sacramental marriage makes,” Hensler told OSV.
Sacrament Of Marriage Wedding Program
According to statistics from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, there were 144,000 Catholic sacramental marriages in the United States in 2017. That figure is down nearly 50 percent from the 261,626 sacramental marriages in 2000. That drop occurred even as the national Catholic population grew by nearly 3 million to 74.3 million in 2017.
Rise in convalidations
Along with statistics that indicate national marriage rates as a whole have remained relatively stable since 2000, the data seems to indicate that not only are fewer Catholics getting married sacramentally, but that they are more likely to get married civilly in a non-Catholic setting.
“We have a lot more convalidations now than we did 10 years ago. People today don’t feel the same obligation to marry in the Church,” said Christian Meert, director of the Office of Marriage and Family Life in the Diocese of Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Meert, the cofounder of CatholicMarriagePrep.com, which offers online Catholic marriage preparation classes for Agape Catholic Ministries, told OSV that he currently has hundreds of couples in his diocese going through the convalidation process.
“One pretty common thing among them is that they don’t know at first what the Church is going to give them in a sacramental marriage,” Meert said. “They don’t know exactly what they’re looking for.”
Catholic marriage preparation leaders told OSV that they estimate about 20 percent of the couples they prepare each year for sacramental marriages are civilly married. Nearly all of those couples approach the Church on their own to have their marriages convalidated. Their reasons vary.
Wedding Sacrament
“Some of them are people who happened to say, ‘Hey, my kid is getting their First Communion. It’s time to get our marriage blessed,'” Verret said. “If that large a number just happens to come forward, what number would come forward if we actually invited them?”
Sacrament Of Marriage Vows
Catholic marriage preparation for civilly married couples varies by dioceses and parishes. Some pastors will bless the couple’s wedding after a few private meetings, while some dioceses require that they complete the standard diocesan marriage preparation program, which may not have a different track for those couples.
Embracing the sacrament
Verret said some civilly married couples who went through Witness to Love in their parishes asked her and her husband to tailor the language in the program’s workbook to couples like themselves, especially those who already have children.
Sacrament Of Marriage Lesson
Also, about a year ago, Verret said Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, told her that he wanted Witness to Love to be part of a new diocesan initiative to reach out to all civilly married couples who were able to have their marriages blessed in the Church.
“We were like, ‘Wow, that is so beautifully ambitious,'” she said. World of tanks free online yellow yi shui.
Verret added that she and her husband decided to make the new initiative a top priority after other dioceses asked them to do the same thing.
Similar to RCIA, Witness to Love links couples in its marriage preparation course with married Catholic couples that they already know who can act as sponsors. The sponsor couples have to be practicing Catholics who are active in their parishes and can help integrate those who are seeking convalidation into the parish community.
“The mentor couple is critical as a bridge of trust into the life of the Church,” Verret said.
Dioceses across the country have been increasingly using sponsor couples in their marriage preparation programs. Jaime and Alicia Ayala of El Paso, Texas, recently completed training to be a sponsor couple and are now working to prepare a young civilly married couple to be married in the Church.
“We will talk to them about their understanding of what a civil marriage is and compare that to what a sacramental marriage is,” Alicia Ayala told OSV. “They’re going to also have to take an NFP course, so that is going to be a huge difference already.”
Verret said she hopes the new initiative — which is being supported by the Our Sunday Visitor Institute — will help civilly married couples feel at home in the Church and give them a better understanding of the fullness of the sacrament for which they are preparing.
Sacrament Of Marriage Wedding Programming
“I think many of these couples had seen their convalidation as more of a simple blessing than an actual sacrament, almost like getting your car blessed,” Verret said. “They almost didn’t understand the significance of it, and, honestly, I don’t think the Church was always clear about that.”
Brian Fraga is an Our Sunday Visitor Contributing Editor.
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