Alumni Mary-Rose Verret ‘04 and Peter Jesserer Smith ‘09, along with Verret’s husband, Ryan, have released a new book on marriage and family. Titled The Road to Family Missionary Discipleship: Forming Marriages and Families to Share the Joy of the Gospel, the new book offers a framework for family-based evangelization and discipleship that seeks to engage the entire church community through the whole of family life.
This is the second book from the Verrets, following bestseller Witness to Love: How to Help the Next Generation Build Marriages that Survive and Thrive. The book was born out of their Witness to Love ministry, a marriage prep program that pairs engaged couples with married couples in their respective parish communities, providing engaged couples with a model of sacramental marriage and mentors who help them become involved in parish life.
This new book, co-authored by Smith, the national news and features editor for OSV News, offers a guide for parishes to implement the Catechumenate Pathways for Married Life prepared by the Dicastery for Marriage, Family and Life in 2022. The chapters in the book are filled with insights from Catholic leaders who have adopted Witness to Love’s evangelization model or who have been directly involved with the marriage ministry, including Curtis and Michaelann Martin of FOCUS, Katherine Coolidge of the Catherine of Siena Institute, and Dr. Bob Schuchts of the John Paul II Healing Center.
Since 2012, the Witness to Love ministry has spread to over 500 parishes in four countries and has been greatly successful in helping couples to have happy and holy marriages. According to Mary-Rose Verret, her experiences at Christendom were integral to the ministry starting in the first place. The formation she received, and the community life she was a part of at Christendom, shaped her view of marriage and helped her to see the importance of being welcomed into a faith community, an integral aspect of Witness to Love.
“At Christendom, I was in a really intense, concentrated, really impactful witness of the students and teachers,” says Verret. “I got to experience being in a community where everyone is focused on the same goal of getting to heaven and understanding the faith and learning together.”
To order the new book, visit here.
To learn more about Witness to Love, visit here.