Most people know that to be married in the Catholic Church, a couple must go through some form of marriage preparation, known as PreCana counseling. But what if they are students living in different cities? What if one of them is out of the country on a military deployment? What if they just don’t see the need to sit around in a conference room with a group of other people, drinking lukewarm coffee and eating stale doughnuts? The archdiocese’s Family Ministries Office will soon have an answer for them: online marriage preparation. Family Ministries staff are now recording video segments that will be part of the program, with a planned release date in November, said Frank Hannigan, director of the Family Ministries Office. The program will follow the outline of the regular archdiocesan PreCana program, but rather than having a guide couple lead the discussion on topics such as handling finances and raising children, those topics will be covered on video. Couples will be asked to watch the segments — somewhere between 8 and 15 of them — together, then discuss them, possibly with the help of downloadable worksheets and workbooks. Segments will include Natural Family Planning and theology of the body as well as faith and sacraments and why Catholics get married in churches. Additional segments will be available for couples with special issues, such as those who have been married before or have children from a previous relationship. More communication “We wanted the couples to communicate with one another,” Hannigan said. “We think that this way, they might actually spend more time talking about these things. We’re hoping this will identify issues they need to talk about more.” The impetus, Hannigan said, was a pastor who called about a couple separated by war, with one deployed to Iraq. While the primary market will be couples who are separated by distance, Hannigan and Kim Hagerty of the Family Ministries Office say they know that many young couples will want to use it even if they live in the same city. “They like being online,” Hagerty said. “They are online. You have to go where they are.” And they are online, a fact made clear by the way engaged couples choose to communicate with the Family Ministries Office. “We get e-mails, we get Facebook messages,” Hagerty said. “Our phones don’t ring like they used to. Ninety percent of our couples pay online.” Keep them in church Making this available might make it more likely that young couples will get married in the Catholic Church, which would make them more likely to remain in the faith, Hagerty said. To make it work, the office is working with a company called “The Marriage Group” in Michigan. The company has the technical expertise to make it work, Hannigan said. “We have the content and 60 years of experience working with engaged couples,” he said. The program will be made available to couples marrying in dioceses across the United States, provided it gets their diocesan approval. Hannigan said it could be a good fit for large rural dioceses — such as the Diocese of Cheyenne, which takes in the entire state of Wyoming — where couples would have to make a long drive to go to a marriage prep session. An added benefit is that couples who sign up for online marriage preparation will get continuing support in the year following their wedding, something that was added to the marriage ministry guidelines in the Archdiocese of Chicago in 2005. “A lot of times, people did Pre- Cana and had the wedding, and we would shake their hands and say, ‘See you at the Golden Wedding Anniversary Mass in 50 years,’” Hannigan said. Cost for the online program is yet to be determined.