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  News - National

Acceptance of Franciscan International Award to WWME

Bob & Joy Hernandez and Fr. Mark Willenbring

Acceptance presentation May 11, 2006, Egan, MN

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Bob & Joy Hernandez and Fr. Mark Willenbring accept Award from Fr. Jim Kent, OFM Conv, Vicar Provincial, Franciscan Province of Our Lady of Consolation

BOB
We sincerely thank Franciscan Retreats, as well as the Conventual Franciscan Order, for honoring Worldwide Marriage Encounter - USA with the 2006 Franciscan International Award. As the United States Secretariat Team for WWME, we gratefully accept the award on behalf of the many English, Hispanic, & Korean couples & priests who serve our ministry in the United States and who are dedicated to the mission of our worldwide movement, which is to renew our beloved Catholic Church through the sacraments of Matrimony and Holy Orders.

We are Bob & Joy Hernandez from Upton, MA. We were married in 1965 and have two daughters, Julia & Amy. We are members of Holy Angels Parish, which is part of the diocese of Worcester, MA. We experienced our WWME Weekend in June 1977 and our marriage, our faith, and our lives continue to be strengthened by our ongoing encounter with one another and with God.

We serve WWME as part of an Ecclesial Leadership Team with Msgr. Chuck Kosanke, a priest in the archdiocese of Detroit. Msgr. Chuck is the Rector of SS. Cyril & Methodius Seminary in Orchard Lake, MI. He is unable to be with us tonight, but sends his gratitude and love.

We are blessed to accept your Franciscan International Award with Fr. Mark Willenbring, who served WWME as the former U.S. Secretariat Team and currently serves in an ecclesial leadership team with Norm & Judy Hansen for the states of Minnesota, and North & South Dakota.

FR. MARK
It is a great honor for me to be present with Bob & Joy for this special recognition banquet and to sit in for Msgr. Chuck Kosanke. I am a retired diocesan priest of the Diocese of St. Cloud, Minnesota and presently reside in St. Ann’s Rectory in Kimball, MN.

I experienced my WWME Weekend in April of 1977 and have served in many levels of leadership in the movement over the past 29 years, including the National Secretariat Team from February, 2001 until the untimely death of Bob Tabone in 2003. In addition to leadership obligations I present many WWME weekends and team training experiences, primarily in Spanish all over the country. This has been an extremely rewarding apostolate as I witness our Hispanic brothers and sisters come alive in their relationship and in the practice of our Catholic Faith.

JOY
The history of Marriage Encounter began in 1952 when a young Diocesan Laborer priest in Spain, Fr. Gabriel Calvo, developed a series of conferences for married couples. The focus was on developing an open and honest relationship within marriage and learning to live out a sacramental relationship in the service of others. The participants were asked to reflect on themselves as individuals, on their married relationship with each other, and on their relationship with God. For approximately ten years, the couples who presented the conferences traveled throughout Spain and were called “The Marriage Teams of Pope Pius XII”.

In 1962, Fr. Calvo combined the series of conferences into a weekend retreat and presented it to 28 married couples in his native city of Barcelona. The experience enjoyed immediate success and rapidly spread throughout Spain as the Encuentro Conjugal. In 1966, Fr. Calvo and James & Mercedes Ferrer addressed the International Confederation of Christian Family Movements in Caracas and soon, Encuentro Conjugal spread to Latin America and then to Spanish-speaking married couples in the United States.

At the close of the Christian Family Movement Convention at Notre Dame University the United States in 1967, a Mexican couple and an American missionary priest from Mexico presented the Encuentro Conjugal weekend to seven married couples and several priests. The Christian Family Movement actively supported the experience and in 1968 invited Spanish couples and priests to come to the United States to conduct weekends for both Spanish-speaking and English-speaking married couples.

Shortly thereafter, American couples and priests were conducting what was then known as Marriage Encounter weekends.

A couple from New Jersey, Jamie & Arline Whalen, called together the Presenting Team couples & priests of Marriage Encounter to form a National Executive Board to formulate guidelines for the fast-growing weekend experience and to coordinate the development of Marriage Encounter in the U.S. and Canada. One of the most rapidly growing areas was in the Diocese of Rockville Center, New York under the leadership of Ed & Harriet Garzero and Fr. Chuck Gallagher, a Jesuit youth retreat master. Their vision expanded beyond the experience of the Marriage Encounter weekend to include development of a “community” of married couples and priests who would provide support for living out the values of sacramental relationship on a daily basis, particularly through use of the communication tool taught on the weekend called “dialogue”. In addition, there was strong emphasis on renewal of the Catholic Church by renewing the Sacrament of Matrimony and the Sacrament of Holy Orders.

This expanded vision created a philosophical difference with the National Board and eventually the “New York Expression” of Marriage Encounter separated from the national organization to form Worldwide Marriage Encounter. In the fall of 1971, Worldwide Marriage Encounter made the decision to spread the experience throughout the United States and the world. With the assurance of financial aid, training, and prayer support from New York, Presenting Team couples and priests traveled first to Grand Forks, North Dakota to present the Worldwide Marriage Encounter weekend and establish a support community. Once the area was self-sustaining, Presenting Team couples & priests continued to reach out across the U.S. until, in December, Worldwide Marriage Encounter reached Santa Barbara, CA -- the site of the first Weekend on the West Coast. To date, over 2 million couples in the United States have experienced the power of a WWME weekend.

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Fr. Mark Willenbring and Bob & Joy Hernandez and Fr. Ken Bartsch

BOB
At almost the same time, WWME began international expansion, with Presenting Teams from New York going to Belgium and to England. Worldwide Marriage Encounter is now offered in 86 countries around the world. In 1978, the WWME World Council was formed and is comprised of the leadership couple & priest — an ecclesial team — from each of the seven secretariats: Asia, Pacific, Pan-Africa, Europe, Canada, Latin America and United States, plus the International Coordinating Team who leads the Council.

Even though Worldwide Marriage Encounter began as a Roman Catholic experience, it has always provided opportunities for married couples of other faiths to attend weekends. Many of these couples saw the potential that WWME offered for church renewal for their own religious denomination. In 1971, WWME was introduced to the Jewish and Episcopal faiths and provided the initial financial support and guidance needed for these faith expressions to flourish. An Interfaith Board was established in 1978 and continues to meet twice yearly. Worldwide Marriage Encounter is currently presented in 10 other faith expressions: Baptist, Episcopal, Lutheran, Mennonite & Brethren, PanOrthodox, Presbyterian, Reformed, Seventh Day Adventist, United Church of Christ, and United Methodist. The love of God, our Christian faith, and deep belief in the renewing power of our WWME movement unite each faith expression and help to build greater understanding and acceptance as we strive to change the world.

BOB
My journey with WWME began with a class I attended at work. During the discussion groups, I often spoke about Joy and our family and of my commitment to our marriage. After the class concluded, one of my co-workers asked me if I knew about WWME. When I said no, he began to tell me about his experience on the Weekend and about how his marriage had been renewed. I was interested, but skeptical and cautious. Joy and I had a good marriage and I didn’t want to take any chances with our relationship. After interrogating him for almost three weeks, I decided that WWME might have something to offer and I scheduled us for an upcoming Weekend.

JOY
When Bob told me we were going on a Worldwide Marriage Encounter weekend, I asked him if something was wrong in our marriage. I had never heard of WWME, but it sounded like something for troubled marriages.

When Bob reassured me that the Weekend was for HAPPY marriages, like ours, I felt excited that we would be spending an entire weekend together, focusing on each other. We had been married twelve years and had two young children. Bob worked full time, as did I, and we had very little time just for the two of us. When we arrived at Anna Maria College for the Weekend, I envisioned a roomful of happily married couples eager to improve their communication skills and enrich their marriages. I assumed it would be a weekend of lectures and helpful hints and came prepared with paper and pen to take notes. When one woman and two men sat down at the table in front of us on Friday night, I was confused. One man was obviously the husband, but who was the other man? A priest? Oh no, it was going to be a RELIGIOUS weekend! What did we get ourselves into?

BOB
I knew a Catholic priest was involved in the presentations on the Weekend, but I assumed he was there to present the theology of the Church about marriage. What else would he have to contribute?

Friday night was a little unsettling for Joy and me. We were asked to write about our feelings, but I prided myself on not allowing the weakness of emotions to influence my life. In our first personal reflection, I wrote what Joy called an “inter-office memo” while she poured out her feelings. I felt awkward and uneasy as we ended the first night of our Weekend.

On Saturday morning, I listened as one of the husbands talked about how he wore a “mask” that hid who he really was, even from his wife. He was a lot like me and as he continued to share his story, I began to see my life from a different perspective. Success at my job was extremely important to me and I justified the long hours and weekends at work by telling Joy I was doing it for her and for our family. Suddenly, I realized I had been deceiving myself and was neglecting the most important person in my life - Joy.

Without her, my career, the money, my position, meant nothing. All the emotions I controlled so tightly began to surface and I felt tears running down my face, for the first time in many years. As the Weekend progressed, I felt my heart begin to soften and open to Joy in ways I never imagined. I struggled with learning to accept my feelings as part of who God intended me to be as a man and as a husband. I stopped giving advice to Joy on how she could improve and fell in love all over again with who she was.

I discovered that God had a plan for our marriage and for our love — a plan that could help renew the Church and change the world.

JOY
Our Weekend was nothing like I expected. I never took a single note. I was amazed that other people’s personal lived experience, especially those of a priest, could touch me so deeply. Their thoughts, feelings, judgments, and fears were achingly familiar. I felt both comforted and bewildered by the similarity. Every presentation drew me to look at myself, my assumptions and behaviors, and at the ways Bob and I lived our marriage, with and without God. I realized how little of myself I trusted to Bob, despite our “happy” marriage. Even I didn’t know who I was or what I was searching for to fill the void in my soul.

The answer, for me, came on Sunday morning of our Weekend. Reveling in Bob’s love for me that morning, I was taken aback to hear the Presenting Team say, “We Are The Church”. Despite having converted to the Catholic faith, I never had the sense that I belonged or was worthy enough. In the 12 years of our marriage, we rarely attended church and had only recently returned just prior to our Weekend. When I listened to the Presenting Team tell us how important we were as members of Christ’s Body and how we were loved and needed by our Catholic Church, all my yearning was finally fulfilled and, just as I surrendered my heart to Bob, I joyfully surrendered my heart to my Catholic family. Armed with Bob’s love and certain now of God’s love, I was ready to answer the call to the mission of WWME to renew the Church and bring positive change in the world by living our sacrament of matrimony among God’s people.

FR. MARK
My motivation for participating in a WWME Weekend was primarily to observe the dynamics of the weekend and to understand why this program had such a tremendous impact on the lives of parishioners who had previously attended. I didn’t expect any real benefit for myself. After all the very title of the weekend stated that it was for the enrichment of married couples and I wasn’t married. In fact, I felt rather embarrassed attending the weekend and sat as an observer in the back of the presentation room. But as the experience enfolded I became excited about the sharing of feelings, something that I had never given much attention to in the past.

I began to realize that the art of communication is vital not only for married couples but especially for us priests. The idea of regarding the people of God as my spouse and that at ordination I became in a sense married to all of you was a new and challenging concept for me. To observe the wonderful blending of the two sacraments of Matrimony and Holy Orders was and continues to be a powerful force for the renewal of our Church. I have worked with many outstanding and truly holy married couples and have been the recipient of their genuine love and respect.

As a young priest I looked for some program that would help create the kind of family life that I had enjoyed in my own home. My parents were super role models for me and for my siblings and I often wondered where they got all their wisdom and goodness. Now I realize, of course, that our specific sacrament empowers us to live such lives.

BOB
The basic philosophy of WWME rests on the belief that the Sacrament of Matrimony and the Sacrament of Holy Orders are a call to unity for the married couple and the priest. For the couple, this is a call, first of all, to a unity with each other. That unity in love is a sacramental sign to the Church of Jesus’ love for all of us. A married couple, therefore, not only receive the Sacrament of Matrimony, but their relationship becomes the Sacrament. Their daily ‘yes’ to one another is also a ‘yes’ to the Church which calls them to a sacramental way of life - not only for their sake, but for the sake of the Church.

The priest experiences a call to unity with the people of God. They invite him to be their priest. Just as matrimony is not a private relationship for a married couple, a priest’s priesthood is not exclusively his own. The call to celibacy in the western Church is not a call to chaste “bachelorhood”, but a call to intimacy, belonging, and investment in his people.

JOY
Worldwide Marriage Encounter views the weekend experience as the beginning of a new way of life for both the married couple and the priest.

Follow up programs and ongoing development of the WWME community at the local level are seen as vital parts of personal and spiritual growth and support. For the couple, these provide an opportunity for continued discernment of their role and mission within the Church, usually lived out in the context of the parish. Many couples become involved in parish leadership roles, especially in ministries relating to religious education, marriage preparation, family life programs, liturgy, prayer and spirituality.

WWME is also a means of evangelization. Couples often experience not only a conversion to each other, but a real conversion to their Catholic Church. The “unchurched” or those who have been apart from the sacramental life of the Church for many years, frequently experience Church in a new way and begin to develop a deep sense of their own importance to the Church as a sacramental sign of Jesus’ love and a sense of belonging. There is a new awareness of the significance of others in their lives.

FR. MARK
At the heart of Worldwide Marriage Encounter’s philosophy is the deep-seated belief that the Sacrament of Matrimony and the Sacrament of Holy Orders are powerful and precious gifts given by God to the Catholic Church. The renewal of these sacraments is the special gift that WWME has to bring to the Church in its own continuing self-renewal. WWME, therefore, sees itself as joining with other movements who bring their own gifts to the work of renewal, providing new life for all people of God.

Thank you and God bless each of you.

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2006 Franciscan International Award plaque

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