“What’s different about our program,” he said during a recent Zoom call, “is that it’s an opportunity for the Holy Spirit to speak to the heart of an engaged couple.”

And it’s getting results. What started out as a three-hour brainstorming session, looking prayerfully for ways to rethink marriage prep, has become a phenomenon. Twelve years after it began in Lafayette, Louisiana, Witness to Love is now flourishing in multiple languages in ninety dioceses in the United States, where it is touching tens of thousands of lives and strengthening countless marriages.

“Pope John Paul II said that the family is the way of the Church,” Ryan explained. “It is our prayer that the Lord will use Witness to Love in some small way to build up the Church in the United States.” And they’re just getting started. More than a decade after it began, the organization could soon be having a global impact. Pope Francis recently named the Verrets as consultants to the Dicastery for Laity and Family Life at the Vatican, giving them the opportunity to share their insights and experience of Witness to Love with Church leaders from around the world.

A Result of Intense Prayer. The journey began when the Verrets settled in Louisiana after relocating from suburban Virginia, where they had both worked in marriage and family ministry for the Diocese of Arlington. “We had this sense that we were doing the best we could,” Mary-Rose said. “My work in the Diocese of Lafayette provided the opportunity to have many one-on-one conversations with hundreds of engaged couples and to listen to what they desired in their future marriage and what they had hoped the Church would provide for them as they were preparing. But ultimately, it was not until I left my job at the diocese and began working at the parish level that I realized that one or two days of diocesan marriage prep wasn’t enough, no matter how good it was.” 

They were giving presentations and leading retreats; they thought they were making a difference. But a priest friend, Fr. Michael Delcambre, was curious about the success rate. He suggested that they do some follow-up research on couples who had gone through diocesan marriage prep programs. What they found was a shock.

“There were some who were divorced who we didn’t know about,” Mary-Rose explained. A deeper dive into Catholic divorce statistics proved to be an eye-opener. Nationally, about one in four Catholic marriages ends in divorce. And the statistics closer to home weren’t any better. “We learned,” she said, “that about four out of every seventeen couples who had been through these programs were divorced in the first five years of marriage.

“Fr. Delcambre was stunned. So he canceled staff meetings and said, ‘Let’s take this to prayer.’ We had Adoration, and he said, ‘No one is going home until we figure this out.’ We had three hours of intense prayerful conversation.” Out of that, Witness to Love was born.

Transformative Change. The organization’s website sums it up succinctly: “Witness to Love is a virtues-based, Catechumenate model of marriage renewal and preparation.” What that means: in Witness to Love, engaged couples select a mentor couple—people they may know, whose marriage they admire—and embark on a six-month program of discovering what it means to be a Catholic married couple.

“We came up with guidelines,” Mary-Rose explained. “Ryan and I form the parish leaders, who then coach and accompany the engaged couples and the mentors. The parish leaders are usually clergy or parish staff or volunteers who are involved in marriage formation.”

The mentor couples undergo their own training for the program. “They have a book that supplements the formation they do alongside the engaged couple,” Mary-Rose said. “They also attend the retreat that the engaged couple attends, and there’s a theology discussion night in the mentor couple’s home with the engaged couple and a priest. This is where some of the more personal or difficult subjects are addressed in a way that is very similar to the way Christ would sit down with someone in their home.”

And, she says, both the mentor couples and the engaged couples are enriched and transformed. “The transformation that takes place in the mentor couple’s marriage and spiritual lives has to do with the fact that they are being asked by a couple who admires them to share their marriage, to walk with them and to learn with them.” The mentors do all of the work that the engaged couples do and more. Because a lot of the mentors did little or no marriage prep themselves, they are also ripe for renewal and conversion.”

At the end of the day, it just works. Across the months, engaged couples learn skills for communication and compromise as well as what it means to be in a Catholic marriage. In time, that can begin a kind of conversion. “It is revolutionary,” Mary-Rose said. “The focus isn’t just the transmission of information as much as it is also a change of life, developing a relationship with Jesus Christ.”

Results That Speak for Themselves. “We found out the divorce rate for couples who went through our model,” Mary-Rose said. “Three years in, nobody had gotten divorced. Five years in, nobody had gotten divorced. Something is working. It wasn’t rocket science. It was these mentor couples. They had bridged these couples back into the Church.”

Significantly, the process doesn’t end once the rice has been thrown and the wedding cake has been cut. The couples continue with what Ryan calls a kind of “marriage mystagogia,” or a way of being “initiated” into the mystery that is marriage. This is comprised of “date nights” in small groups after the wedding to keep the connections and continue learning and growing.

Real estate agent Jude LeCompte of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, took part in the Witness to Love program when he and his fiancée, Abby, began planning their wedding in 2022. They chose as their mentor couple Deacon Adam Conque and his wife, Marianne, a “beautiful, joyful couple,” Jude said, with a big, bustling family of nine children. They met with the Conques once a month for six months.

“It gave us a realistic outlook on what marriage looks like,” Jude recalled. “It felt like a very personal experience of marriage prep because it was unscripted. It felt more like a conversation with this mentor couple than it did a classroom setting.”

As a child of divorce, Jude feels the Witness to Love program gave him new insight and a helpful model in the mentor couple. “I never really had my dad in the house,” he said, “and I didn’t know what sacramental marriage looked like. I didn’t know that I needed such a beautiful example of this couple to teach me what it means.” He’s now a firm believer that the Witness to Love model can change lives and build stronger marriages.

“I would say that the best way to prepare yourself for marriage is to have an honest conversation with a married couple about what that looks like,” he explained. “We admired them and grew to trust them. It was them inviting us into their home and being able to witness what married life looks like that made a big difference.”

Jude and Abby have been married two years and have a daughter. “The process fulfilled its promise,” Jude concluded. “It gave us mentors in our lives and in our marriage that we can continue to have conversations with. I know we’ll continue to look up to them and aspire to be like them.”

More Than a Name. Stories like this one are what help fuel Ryan and Mary-Rose’s commitment to Witness to Love and serve as a reminder that the organization’s name is also its mission. Mentor couples in the program are truly “witnesses to love.” They help define what Catholic marriage can be.

It’s also something the two of them continue to bear witness to in their daily lives. Now married fifteen years with six children ranging in age from one to fourteen, Ryan and Mary-Rose hope their lives and the organization’s message can help show others that a Catholic marriage is a lifelong vocation. They see a future where more engaged couples can learn from mentors—and, ultimately, where more married role models might even be elevated to sainthood. “Maybe in our lifetime,” Ryan said, “we’ll see the first married couple become Doctors of the Church.”

Deacon Greg Kandra serves the Diocese of Orlando, Florida, and is the author of The Busy Person’s Guide to Prayer, available from bookstore.wau.org. For more information on Witness to Love, visit witnesstolove.org.