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The Joy-filled Marriage Preparation programme will help to prepare engaged couples to embrace God’s plan for the sacrament of matrimony is an honor and a privilege.

In today’s climate, it is also a challenge. Joy-Filled Marriage is a marriage preparation program designed to meet that challenge. The two components of the program—Life Skills for Couples and God’s Plan for Love—incorporate rich Catholic theology with sound psychology.

This program offers a comprehensive approach to marriage preparation that covers not only the sacramentality and theology of marriage but also the practical life skills necessary to live out the rich Catholic vision of marriage.

 

This program incorporates a three-stage approach:

 

  • Learning Stage: Couples learn sound principles and a fresh, virtue-based approach to life skills, as well as the Catholic vision of marriage and the beautiful and significant gift of sexuality.
  • Discuss and Discover Stage: Through a variety of focused questions and activities, couples discuss their relationships, learn about themselves, and begin applying what they have learned.
  • Plan and Build Stage: Couples recognize topics they may need to discuss at a later date, identify shared goals, and set a unified vision to build a joy-filled marriage. All this is captured in one wonderful keepsake, the Couple’s Journal.

 

This program will help participants:

  • Appreciate what the Catholic Church teaches about marriage, and why
  • Embrace the gift of grace that makes a lifelong, joy-filled marriage possible
  • Explore important topics, identify shared goals, and set concrete plans to build a joy-filled marriage

 

 

God's Plan for Love

 

God’s Plan for Love is the sacramentality component of the Joy-Filled Marriage program. God’s Plan for Love is designed to offer engaged couples a more complete understanding of marriage than any program available in the Church today. Based on St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, God’s Plan focuses on God’s glorious plan for marriage and is intended to address key components of marriage preparation, including catechesis in the theology of marriage and the gift of human sexuality.

 

God’s Plan for Love, its companion, Life Skills for Couples (which discusses the practical skills useful in marriage), and the Couple’s Journal make up one complete Joy-Filled Marriage program. This program can be used in any setting in which marriage preparation can be done—from the intimacy of a living room in a mentor couple model to a small group at a parish to an auditorium filled with couples diocesan-wide.

Life Skills for Couples

 

Life Skills for Couples is the virtue-based life-skills component of the Joy-Filled Marriage marriage preparation programLife Skills is designed to help engaged couples set patterns of thought and behavior that will ensure a lifelong, joy-filled marriage. Through interactive videos, featuring witness couples, and easy-to-navigate written materials, this program helps couples prepare for their future life together.

 

Life Skills for Couples springs from the teachings of St John Paul II’s calling to families and couples to explore their uniqueness by seeking their identity and mission in Christ.

 

This program is intimately connected with God’s Plan for Love, which discusses the sacramentality of marriage. Along with the Our Joy-Filled Marriage Journal, these make up the one Joy-Filled Marriage program. This program can be used in any setting in which marriage preparation can be done—from the intimacy of a living room in a mentor couple model to a small group at a parish to an auditorium filled with couples diocesan-wide.