Kansas City Catholics Bet Big on Marriage — and See Dramatic Results

Two years ago, parishioners at Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church in Shawnee, Kansas, spotted an announcement in their weekly bulletins that stood out amid the usual news about youth group meetings and plans for Advent.

Splashed across the second page was a photo of a young couple gazing adoringly into each other’s eyes, mugs of beer raised in a toast. It was accompanied by an invitation to married couples in the parish to join a “Couples & Cocktails Kick Off” featuring “fellowship, food, and fun with hors d’oeuvres and drinks provided.” And the kicker: Childcare would be provided.

The response was overwhelming.

“We had 242 people attend that first event,” Emily Dumler, director of parish life, told the Register. “There was a lot of buzz and excitement because these couples had felt a lack of opportunities at our parish to do things together.” 

That gathering was more than just a party. Part of a bold experiment aimed at revitalizing marriages in the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas, it drew couples who otherwise might have been reluctant to participate in what was to be the first of many events planned for the parish’s new marriage ministry.  The parish had recently signed a three-year contract with Communio, a national nonprofit based in Alexandria, Virginia, which helps Catholic and non-Catholic churches organize events and offer skills-based instruction aimed at helping couples strengthen their marriages. 

The organization helps busy pastors offer marriage ministry by creating a detailed “playbook” curated for each parish. They plan the events, provide the software and the instructional materials, take care of the marketing, bring in expert speakers, and coach pastors and their teams.

Father Jaime Zarse, pastor of Sacred Heart, is confident that focusing on the health of his parish’s marriages will have a ripple effect.

“We are striking at the root cause of everything from transmitting the faith to children to having a parish that is thriving and that is on mission,” he said. “As a pastor, the fastest way for you to destroy my school and my tithing and everything in between is to go after my marriages.” 

Sacred Heart is one of 12 parishes in the Kansas archdiocese participating in the initiative, which began in 2022 when then-Archbishop Joseph Naumann of the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas partnered with Communio.

Archbishop Naumann, who retired in 2025, told the Register that he decided to focus on marriage given the high rate of divorce, the decrease in young adults choosing to marry, and the decline in the number of Catholics marrying in the Church. 

“For me, it is obvious that a priority for the Church in the United States today is to support family life, which means supporting married couples in their vocation,” Archbishop Naumann said.

Over the last two years, more than 500 people at Sacred Heart have taken part in activities sponsored by the marriage ministry. Some events are mostly fun, such as a “date night” where couples take part in Adoration followed by drinks and dinner. Others are more instructional, offering practical guidance on how to better communicate with one another and navigate conflict resolution. 

Participants enrolled in the “marriage course” meet weekly to watch a video series provided by Communio and then visit the Adoration chapel together before talking through questions in the accompanying workbook. Couples have told Dumler that the program has enriched their relationships by forcing them to have conversations that they otherwise would have felt awkward initiating.

She says that the initiative has already borne fruit. Mass attendance is up, and over the last two years, nine couples have reported that their marriages were saved.

“It’s normalizing having a healthy and strong relationship and always nurturing that so that you’re not in crisis mode down the road,” she said. 

Tiffany and Trevor Scholl, ages 46 and 49, serve as facilitators on the parish’s marriage ministry team. They know firsthand the pitfalls facing couples today, having nearly separated before getting counseling.

While Tiffany said she was at first reluctant to speak to others about their struggles, they now sense a call to do so. “Just understanding how much it’s helped us, we just feel like it’s a gift for others,” Tiffany said.

The Scholls have adopted some of Communio’s best practices, such as a weekly “huddle” where they make time to discuss each other’s concerns for 10 to 15 minutes. Trevor said he has particularly benefited from advice, avoiding saying things like “You make me feel,” and instead, leading with “I feel.”

When Father Zarse got his “marching orders” from the archdiocese to partner with the Communio marriage apostolate, he said, he didn’t need any convincing that this was something his parish needed. As the oldest of five children, he witnessed his parents “wrestle to get on the same page for many years of my youth.”

 “My parents got pulled apart,” he said. Between the demands of his father’s focus on his career and the family’s involvement in competitive sports, his parents had separate schedules and the family rarely sat down to dinner together. 

Even though he knew his parents’ marriage was in trouble, it was a huge shock when they divorced. “It felt like an asteroid hit our family, like if my family was a giant block of ice in the ocean, all of a sudden we got blown to smithereens and everybody was drifting in a different direction,” is how he described the impact it had.

Three years later, though, his parents remarried after four deaths in the family brought about a conversion of hearts. “I saw the Lord bring them back to life,” he said. Now he hopes his parish’s focus on marriage ministry will help couples avoid the pitfalls his parents faced.

J.P. de Gance, the founder and president of Communio, started the marriage ministry apostolate in 2018 buoyed by the results of a pilot program he had run through Philanthropy Roundtable to assess the effectiveness of church-based marriage ministry. The results of that experiment convinced him that local churches were the best way to reach couples and get them to work to strengthen their marriages.

“We wanted to support churches to reach people they couldn’t otherwise reach and then help them run life-changing evidence-based Christian programming that was likely improve marriage success,” he said of the pilot program.

One of the cities they used as a test case was Jacksonville, Florida, which had such a high rate of divorce that in 2013 was named one of 10 cities “Where Marriage Goes to Die” by Huffington Post. 

A key to the experiment was a digital marketing campaign that drew almost 60,000 people to churches in Jacksonville — Catholic and non-Catholic — that had agreed to implement their marriage ministry program.

The results of the experiment were astounding. After three years, Jacksonville’s divorce rate had plummeted by 24%. The findings were so striking that Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project took a closer look, ultimately publishing a study acknowledging the initiative’s impact on families.

“Our initial data analysis suggests Communio has had an exceptional impact on marital stability in Duval County. As family scholars, we have rarely seen changes of this size in family trends over such a short period of time,” Wilcox wrote.

That success drew the attention of Archbishop Naumann, leading to what has become a case study for Communio in the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas. 

According to Communio’s data, after completing the program, 66% of those in the archdiocese who reported being at a high risk of divorce no longer believed that they would get divorced. Parishes that implemented the program, it found, also experienced a 23% increase in Mass attendance. 

Communio doesn’t come cheap. If a parish contracts with it separately, without a diocesan sponsor, the bill runs to $30,000 a year for coaching, technology support and marketing. That amount is discounted to $3,600 a year if a diocese contracts with the nonprofit for multiple parishes. This, however, is a one-time investment, as parishes are expected to be able to eventually run their own programs paying a nominal fee to Communio for the use of its software, resources and marketing support. 

The apostolate appears to be offering something that parishes aren’t providing. According to a study commissioned by Communio, 85% of churches don’t offer any marriage ministry for their faithful.

Before focusing on marriage, De Gance, a Catholic father of eight, had worked for several conservative political organizations, including Conservative Leadership PAC, The Leadership Institute, Koch Industries and Americans for Prosperity.

“I started to realize that professionally I could do a lot more good by figuring out ways that we can help people live healthy and holy marriages and get plugged into the active life of a a local church,” he told the Register.

 De Gance hopes parish-run marriage ministry catches on across the country. His goal is to “make it normative again that adults grow up in an intact married family by the end of the 2030s.”

To do that, he’s aiming to get Communio in 16% of the Catholic and Protestant churches that have 500 or more weekly attendees. To date, the group has worked with more than 400 churches and is currently contracted with 12 dioceses in the state of California. In the Diocese of Tulsa, 30 parishes are taking part in the program.

Why 16% of churches? 

That’s the “tipping point,” de Gance explained, referring to Malcom Gladwell’s theory that there is a point at which a trend or behavior becomes normative.

“If we can hit that tipping point by year-end 2030, this approach will organically spread on a national level in the Church by the end of the 2030s,” he said.

“That’s the long-term goal. What we want to see is that the Church is mobilized to restore marriage and healthy family life,” de Gance said.

Father Zarse is 100% on board and agrees that marriage ministry should be the highest priority for most parishes. While he is committed to Catholic education, youth ministry and young adult ministry, he said, focusing on marriage will really move the needle.

“Everything comes back to God’s plan for the original small group, in my opinion. And that’s our marriages,” he said. 

“We got to go after these marriages,” he said. “Some people think I’m crazy, but some people have said, ‘I think he might be on to something.’”