for the team behind the scenes, i'm charles davis and we'll see you all right back here next time. (energetic rousing music) (energetic rousing music continues) (energetic rousing music continues) (bright music)

anecdote from a layman, when i'm in the self-help section of the bookstore, i see things to help you not only with your business or self-esteem, but they seem to be offering help with your marriage. and the second to that is books to help you with parenting, and if so, it is not surprising, marriage and family, a couple vowing their love and fidelity, the home which is the creation of human life and some would say even social and civil life. do we have an institution more basic and simple than marriage? do we have any more task more difficult and demanding than

marriage and we have a deeper place of joy and love or any arena of life in which we, i am more exposed to another person or better known to another person? with my many defects, with a few virtues to offer as well. the catholic church calls marriage a sacrament. the catholic church is teaching on what marriage is, how best to approach it and god willing, how to succeed it. >> when you put positivity out there, it does come back.

>> it gets challenging. >> oh, thank you so much.

>> hello, on behalf of the archdiocese, welcome to mosaic, i guess today is ed hoffner, a very important office at san francisco, you have been in this institution for six years and prior to that? >> prior to that, i was involved in very similar work. >> and let me ask you, you have a couple of masters degrees. >> i have a masters degree at biochemistry, i used to teach that in seattle, and i have a

masters of theology with the state of dominicans. >> you do have a deep sense of theological understanding, and as i mentioned, marriage is our topic and that is your profession, marriage resources and marriage help, so you explained to me that it is based on the catholic theology or anthropology or a mix, so help us understand that. >> sure, to put it in a nutshell, we start with god and what we know about god? god is? >> okay, i'm going to guess he is love. >> yes, love, his inner nature, we also have a revelation that god is one but three persons at the same time, it is very interesting. there is no other religion that understands that. i grew up with that as a catholic schoolboy and i knew that and i could pass a test and it didn't really mean anything

to me. then i realized, it was being pointed out to me, god is love, so god has to be more than one person. how many people do you have to have to have love? >> at least two, i would say. >> so, have a dynamic that would be, the sun giving back to the father and how dynamic that would be, and when people are in love, how you can almost feel it. and we understand that to be the person of the holy trinity, so god has to be three people, logically speaking. so we start with that. then we had this icon, i don't know if you can see it on the screen. >> we have one slide, which i hope we can bring up here, a famous icon, tell us what this is representing. >> just very briefly, this is the representation of the icon, you can 33 different persons, but if you look closely, you can see the different faces, we can do a whole lecture on the same thing, but they are all

positioned so they are deference to each other, and that is the love between the three of them. this represents the holy trinity. >> and also the visitors, who gave him the good news, so here is the naked icon by itself. as you see, her second shot of the trinity, this icon is altered in some way. >> so, we have god, god of love and the trinity of persons and we read in the very beginning of the bible, god makes man, the human person in his own image, and what does that mean? for the image of god, we are made to love and be loved, that is the most fundamental thing you can say about any person. god is a person's, but he is a spirit, so how is god going to make the flesh and blood analog of this trinity of persons in the bible?

so he created man and woman. so in the trinity, we have deference, community and life and giving love out of that. we have unity, to become one flesh, and life giving love comes out of that. this unity of man and woman is intended to be an icon of the trinity, and in that slide we just looked at, christian marriage is intended to point us towards heavens, it is a preview of the coming attractions, it is a little taste of what is coming. >> my wife has mentioned that on a few occasions, but there's your basis and theology, it is grand and beautiful. >> and then we have the fog, the sin, so relationships are not always beautiful as they should be, men and women have difficulties with each other, you have experienced that, i know i have. so, jesus gave us

the church and sacrament to overcome these difficult issues. god's life is, god's love, it is the relationship of love. this grace and the sacrament gives us the ability to love others in a way that we could not on our own, this supernatural ability to love. and we have six sacraments that are administered by the church and the seventh sacrament is ministered by the couple. >> to me, that is interesting, i read up on this lately as well, so the couple ministers the sacrament to one another, they are the agents of the sacraments, not the priest. >> the priest is the witness, the official witness of this sacrament taking place but the minister of the sacrament, the giving of oneself to the other, this consent to receive that gift and the giving of that gift between the couple, that is done by the couple. every act of love

is in the sense the sacrament but most particularly when they come together as husband and wife, that is a renewal of their wedding vows and of the sacrament and most people don't seem to realize that. >> you are saying the sexual life in marriage is the renewing of the house, of complete gift, of sense of self to the other. >> yes, complete love is jesus, he gives himself to us freely, fully and till the end, fruitfully. and on your wedding day, you vow to love your spouse as jesus loves, i give myself fully till death, and i'm open to new life. >> that is wonderful, we will take a pause and we will talk about that more and dig much deeper when we come back. please join us when we talk more about marriage and the sacrament.

>> hello and welcome back, we are talking with ed hoffner, director of the office of marriage and family life at the ministry of archdiocese of san francisco, and you described the grand, utterly significant, wonderfully fruitful, let's say difficult way of life, the vocation that we have undertaken, i do think we want it so badly we envy those whose marriages look good. you are one of the main, the main project of your office is marriage preparation, something that has to be taught and people train for in a way, do you have a boot camp? how do you tell me how to get married and what to do? >> so, a lot of things we do is exactly doing that, to become

ready, the requirements they need to do, one of this is focus, which is pre-marriage inventory. the couple would respond to 150 statements, things like i'm worried about my fiance's pets, or my fiance and i talked about taking money from our families, all kinds of things. and they do that separately and they come to us and we go over that to them, to try to prevent a lot of surprises ahead of time, as many as we can. that is one thing that we do. >> so let me get this straight, your office offers all kinds of resources and personnel and experts, but this prep happens at the local level? >> typically at the parish level, some aren't set up to do that so i work with the couples and we also have classes on marriage, we call them marriage preparation, but the church is getting away from that, they are calling it formation. because preparation is, but formation is

ongoing. for example, my dad, he loses his license if he doesn't keep up, and my mom is a nurse and she will lose her license, so marriage is also ongoing formation, and we try to offer that more and more. so we have preparation and also ongoing formation. >> that is great, i did marriage preparation, i wasn't sure if there was formation, we were on our own. >> the diocese is doing that, but it is not common, we do marriage, family life, women's retreats, men's retreats, i even have the culture project. >> yes, tell us about that. >> it is a young group of missionaries, and we will have a team of five or six of them for basically the school year. and they make a one-year commitment and they go around doing talks on human dignity, how to support it and what offends it, on

social media how to use it. >> because they are addressing youth. >> yes, and they talk about sexual integrity or chastity, so they live this out, they are great role models. young people can see them living this, they are very professional, very personal and positive in their presentations. but they can see these young people living lives of virtue joyfully which obviously in our secular culture, so this is a part of the early preparation. if they start thinking about it, if i get into a relationship with somebody, how do i want that to be? is it a relationship of giving or taking? >> that sounds good, it is like a marriage license, so when you say okay, you are licensed to mary but you have to get continuing education to be good at it, to keep up with it, that

sounds really good to me. do you have it for older folks, too. >> we have it for everybody, not a lot of people take advantage of it, it is honestly not a part of our catholic mentality. a lot of our protestant brothers and sisters do have those programs in their churches. >> in other words, finding the couples midcourse and saying you need to have structure that you can communicate, truly with each other. >> to improve your skills of communication, it is any one of a number of things. >> the neat psychological insights someone gave me about marriage, when you choose your spouse, you are choosing a person who can help repair a past bad relationship, you need to repair what you didn't have with your parent. so, you see a person who can do that for you. >> michael sweeney has a beautiful quote, marriage is for healing, affecting and exalting of the spouse, that is very

good. the healing, as you said, all the things that we didn't get, when i'm in a relationship, i can see that might be so. >> i see marriage as a frightening thing, i'm a very reserved person but you are exposed to that other personnel, and you are out there being known and that is not entirely attractive. on the one hand you can see the benefits of it, she knows when she cares about me, but on the other side, this is a full-time job. >> it is first corinthians 7, verse 28, st. paul says he who marries has troubles in this life. and the couples always look at me and say, why are you telling me this? because i get these phone calls, they say they

have troubles. because they are not perfect, and when we have this mirror in front of us, we see our imperfections and marriage is the vehicle that god uses to become better lovers, to learn how to love which is very difficult. >> that is good, yes, and we are going to learn more about that. we will come back with the final segment with our guest, ed hoffner on marriage.

>> hello and welcome back to mosaic, ed hoffner is telling us about the catholic church's teaching on marriage, it is interesting, very much so. there is preparation that you offer to enter into this state, and an understanding of it, and the formation of these after. i visited your webpage, you have endless resources . the various kinds of resources and various names of these resources, can you highlight a couple of them? >> we have a number of programs, a couple things i might mention, there are people who write a lot about marriage, one of them is

john gottman, he did a lot of research at the university of washington, seattle, they can predict with 92% accuracy which couples will stay together or not, just observing their interactions for 10 minutes . after all this work they have done in their lab, they can watch for 10 minutes, and he talks about the four horsemen of the marriage, criticism, contempt, defensiveness and he talks about how to overcome them. >> i think you and i have learned just by watching the couple at the next table at the restaurant, we can sometimes predict. >> gary is another author, he has been doing this for years, this book that i often give to couples, i gave it to my nephew

two weeks ago, but he has been doing christian marriage for years, he does preparation but also ongoing formation, so both have websites, one is the gottman institute and the other one is the smalley institute. >> someone like you could point out to people, here is the way to go, here are the books to get. >> so if you like to read, here is $15, go change your life and your marriage. >> so there's reading and there's also -- >> we has a worldwide movement, at the archdiocese, english, spanish and chinese, it is a retreat format, they would come for a retreat and there's ongoing sessions afterwards. and couples generally really like

it, they find -- typically we say after five years, you should recharge your marriage, and for couples that are struggling, and even thinking about divorce, there's a similar form, retro vice, it is a fantastic program, it is also a weekend retreat. they might be sitting like this when they come in and the ones that stay for the weekend, typically by the end they are leaning on each other and they say they have about 75% success rate of couples staying together when they go through the whole program. and even the ones that divorce, typically they have better working programs, and when they have kids. >> so, there is a requirement to do these preparations for couples who want to be married in the church. >> yes, we do the focus, we encourage them to take a class in family planning, most people don't even know about that,

even nurses i'm finding, it is amazing. and we have classes offered around the archdiocese and there's also an online program that i really like, catholicmarriageprep.com, you would get paired with a couple, and they try to match you up, but you are matched with a trained couple and they will do it with you one-on-one all the way through, so i like it because it is personalized. and also because most of our programs are one or two days and it is hard to go through a day or two and really incorporate all of that in your life. whereas if you do the online, you are going to do it over time. >> that makes sense. and you meet the engaged couple, you meet with them personally? >> typically it is online, my friend does this, they do the

program online for other couples and other parishes, his wife said it works better online. >> it might well be, do they do skype or facetime? >> yes, skype. >> that is interesting, we are a digital culture, we are always getting stuff through the screen and as you say, this can be done over a stretch of period. if i have a two day intensive in the church basement, i could get a false positive reading, like we are really prepared and we know what we are doing, check the box. but if you have to carry it out, which i think if i'm not incorrect, there is a lengthy period recommended or required by the catholic church. >> six to nine months is recommended. >> and during that time, a structural preparation. so i also have read statistics here and there, i cannot quote them, but 80% of people had good preparation and didn't divorce.

>> yes, much better statistics, it depends on the preparation but anything you do is going to be helpful. >> we have a couple minutes left, you wanted to tell us about an event in which you honor couples who have succeeded in their marriages, can you tell us about this? this is the wedding anniversary mass, an annual event at the archdiocese. >> we do this every february to honor the couples who have been married 30, 40, 50 or more years, last time we had almost two dozen married almost over 50 years. we have a beautiful little reception afterwards and one couple was married 72 years, they had about 40 people in their family, it was beautiful. look it up, it is in february, at the cathedral , and we would love to invite you to attend next year. >> and anybody is welcome, here is a couple. they may be the 72

year? >> no, it was a hispanic couple, but they are probably 40 or 50 years. it is a really nice event. >> you started with god and we are going to be ending with god, as we are going to mass to give thanks for marriage. what is your final message to people interested? >> prepare as much as you can, nobody is ever to prepared for marriage, use the resources, there are many of them. talk to other older couples, get some information from them. >> i will second that, ed's website is wonderful, full of resources and programs by the way. there's men's retreats, couples retreats, all kinds of things to improve your marriage and improve your social understanding of what marriage is all about. thank you very much for joining us and good

luck with your work at the archdiocese. and thank you very much for joining us on this excellent episode of mosaic. thank you very much. ♪ for all those making it big out there... ...shouldn't your mobile service be able to keep up with you? get wifi speeds up to a gig at home and on the go. introducing powerboost, only from xfinity mobile. now that's big. xfinity internet customers, cut your mobile bill in half vs. t-mobile, verizon, and at&t for your first year.

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