Our Programs
Every Day in Love
Preparing to Live in Love
Beginning to Live in Love
Secular to Sacramental
Living in Love
Living in Love Every Day
A Love Worth Praying For
Matrimony, An Invitation to Live in Love
The Pastoral and Matrimonial Renewal Center (PMRC) currently offers six programs centered on the Sacrament of Matrimony as a prophetic revelation of the love of Jesus Christ for the Church and for the world.
Each program is parish-based and seeks to build up the community of the faithful by evangelizing its own members to a higher level of awareness of their own sacramental role in the plan of God and calling forth the power of the Body of Christ to pray for and support marriage and family life.
Every Day in Love offers couples a positive, upbeat, engaging, and empowering initial experience of the PMRC’s unique program of marriage enrichment and education. Designed to be delivered in four, three-hour sessions, couples can pick and choose which ones to attend. Each session is packed with practical strategies, everyday skills, liberating insights, and experiential exercises. The perfect date night and ideal adult learning experience for those who have never done anything or those who have done everything. While the ideal is to make all four sessions, each one stands alone and is open to all.
Register for Every Day in Love
Preparing to Live in Love combines the benefits of a personal mentor with a comprehensive and experiential marriage preparation course based on John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. Each session is packed with insights from the sciences and especially from our rich Catholic theology. Moreover, it is experiential, providing practical life skills, tools, principles, and strategies while offering an authentic witness of a young married couple sincerely living in love in a sacramental marriage.
Register for Preparing to Live in Love
Beginning to Live in Love is a group adaptation of the classic Preparing to Live in Love program of marriage preparation. It uses the same materials and teaches the same skills, tools, principles and strategies. Delivered in four 3-hour sessions normally one week apart, individual engaged couples receive one-on-one personal attention and participate in experiential exercises facilitated by a single Lead Couple and supported by a team of trained mentor couples.
Register for Beginning to Live in Love
Secular to Sacramental is a group adaptation of the classic Preparing to Live in Love program of marriage preparation specifically tailored to Convalidating couples (couples who are married civilly or long term cohabitating with children who desire to have their marriage blessed in the Church). It uses the same materials and teaches the same skills, tools, principles and strategies. Delivered in four 3-hour sessions normally one week apart, individual convalidating couples receive one-on-one personal attention and participate in experiential exercises facilitated by a single Lead Couple and supported by a team of trained mentor couples.
Living in Love is a day and a half mini retreat workshop for married couples that is held in parish facilities and presented by parish couples with the help of the PMRC staff. The fast-paced, “thinking”, action- oriented tone makes the experience wildly popular with young husbands to the delight of their wives, and the liberating insights, affirming exercises, and practical strategies are universally life-changing. Since couples sleep at home, it is a low cost, user-friendly opportunity that quickly gains a reputation for fun and romance in a parish. Couples of every age and demographic are enthused about Living in Love from bilingual Hispanic communities or rural blue collar parishes to affluent upper class suburbs or inner city urban parishes. What is most unique is that it has special appeal with young, newlywed, dual career professionals (MD’s, MBA’s, Phd’s and attorneys) many of whom are pre-evangelized yet become very credible evangelizers.
Living in Love Every Day offers couples who attend the LL weekend the practical skills, principles, and practices necessary to live out the vision presented on the retreat. The majority of couples sign up for this 9 week follow up/mentor training course on Sunday afternoon of the weekend, and the program reconvenes the weekend group for weekly, two hour sessions done in a small group setting. Couple’s who complete Living in Love Everyday are markedly enthused about sharing with others what they have personally learned and put into practice. The PMRC will certify as “Mentors” those couples who complete the training and are qualified to be Ministers of Sacramental Preparation. They become an immediately available parish resource specifically trained to mentor the engaged using “Preparing to Live in Love”.
A Love Worth Praying For invites every catholic from age 7 to 97 to pray for the marriages and families of the parish. By harnessing the prayer of the Body of Christ, we can make a profound impact on our communal awareness of the importance of the Sacrament of Matrimony and our willingness to take responsibility to support and encourage the marriages within our faith community. Each parishioner is encouraged to dedicate one hour of their personal prayer time each month for specific couples and families who come to mind in various circumstances of life from those preparing to marry, to newlyweds, to couples with small children, teenagers, unemployed, caring for a sick spouse, and so forth.
Matrimony, An Invitation to Live in Love is a catechesis on the Sacrament of Matrimony for teens. It constitutes proximate preparation for marriage in that it teaches key relationship life-skills that will be needed in marriage and which can be practiced and developed in the safe, belonging relationship of the family of origin. Taught by a married couple to a small group of teenagers, the “Matrimony” Course consists of a series of one- hour sessions held nominally once a week.
