When Eric and Annie Dudenhoefer married in 1991, they received a copy of psychologist James Dobson’s Love for a Lifetime as a wedding present.

The Catholic couple liked the book so much that they gave it as a gift to other married friends. As they began raising their family, they read other books on marriage and related topics by Dobson, who hosts the popular radio show “Focus on the Family” and heads the hugely successful company that has grown up around it (see family.org).

Five children and 15 years later, the Dudenhoefers are discovering quality books that offer a distinctly Catholic perspective on marriage.

Last fall, the couple began a study of Christopher West’s Theology of the Body for Beginners, based on the writings of Pope John Paul II. They also recently started reading Mary Healy’s Men and Women Are From Eden, another book translating John Paul’s theology of the body into layman’s terms (see “Fuel for the Journey Back,” the Register’s book pick of Feb. 4).

So it is that, where couples like the Dudenhoefers long looked to Dobson and other evangelical Protestants for marital advice, many today are turning to the growing family of books, tapes and other resources offering a Catholic perspective.     

There could be no better time to survey the field than Feb. 11. Yes, it’s the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes and World Day of the Sick, but, by happy coincidence, this year the 11th falls on the second Sunday in February. And that’s Worldwide Marriage Encounter’s annual World Marriage Day.

What marriage couldn’t use a little shot of help, hope and healing — just in time for St. Valentine’s Day?

Register Family Matters columnist Tom McDonald points out that, not many years ago, couples perusing the shelves of a Catholic bookstore wouldn’t find much on marriage and family life. “Today, things are different,” he says. “Catholic publishers offer much more in terms of practical advice than they ever did before.”

McDonald adds that, although Protestants raced ahead of Catholics in providing applicable Christian guidance for couples and families in the 1980s and ’90s, “Catholic marriage advice has become richer than ever, now that John Paul II’s theology of the body is becoming more and more integrated into the resources that are being produced.”

This is important, according to McDonald and other experts, because resources written and produced from a Catholic perspective often will differ in decisive ways from comparable Protestant materials.

“The notion of complete, unreserved self-giving, which extends to such issues as contraception, divorce and others, results in a very different understanding of marriage in the Catholic Church than in Protestant churches,” explains McDonald. “The uniquely Catholic understanding of the sacramental aspect of marriage, along with its permanence, means that Protestant resources will ultimately fall short, even if they can offer good practical tips.”

Author and radio host Greg Popcak, a Catholic psychologist, notes that Chicago Cardinal Francis George has made the point that Catholics in America are Catholic in piety but Calvinist in worldview. “We learn our Catholic prayers,” Popcak says, “but we turn to James Dobson to learn how to live our lives.”

Eye on Eternity

Popcak, director of the Pastoral Solutions Institute (online at exceptionalmarriages.com) and author of For Better Forever! A Catholic Guide to Lifelong Marriage, says Protestant marriage resources aren’t necessarily bad. Rather, from a Catholic perspective, they are incomplete.

For example, because evangelical Protestants believe that a person cannot forfeit his salvation once he or she “accepts Jesus,” evangelical resources rarely treat the self-sacrifice marriage demands as an opportunity for sanctification — an opportunity with eternal ramifications, at that.

“Catholics believe that God called the two of you together to help each other become the people he created you to be,” says Popcak. “And you’re going to play the most important role in each other’s perfection, second only to the saving work of Jesus Christ and your mate’s free will.”

Protestant marriage resources also differ from Catholic ones in the area of headship, Popcak says. “Catholics do have a sense that the husband is the head of the household, but in many Protestant books, that’s an absolute,” he says. “For the Catholic, the husband derives his authority from God and retains it only to the degree that he’s actually serving God in the common good.”

Likewise, Popcak says, Catholics and Protestants have different views of sexuality — particularly when it comes to contraception.

“A couple needs to recognize that their sexuality is a gift to each other,” he says. “It’s supposed to make real God’s love for each of them, as well. This puts it in a whole other sphere than just ‘God wants you to have a great sex life,’ which tends to be the approach that many Protestant books take. That’s not wrong, technically speaking, but it’s just not complete.”

What Marriage Is

A new book by Protestant author Jim Burns, Creating an Intimate Marriage (Bethany House, 2007), nicely illustrates such differences. It focuses largely on cultivating three “important ingredients” in a Christian marriage: affection, warmth and encouragement. The book contains much practical advice about communication and intimacy, including a proposed “Passion Plan” involving daily 15-second kisses and scheduled sex — but it offers little about the theological underpinnings of matrimony as a sacrament.

The book does talk about the nature of marriage as described by Christ in a chapter on “spiritual intimacy,” which also deals with how couples can maintain regular times of prayer and spiritual sharing. But its understanding of what marriage is is worlds away from the Catholic conception.

“The sacrament of matrimony signifies the union of Christ and the Church,” the Catechism teaches (No. 1661). “It gives spouses the grace to love each other with the love with which Christ has loved his Church; the grace of the sacrament thus perfects the human love of the spouses, strengthens their indissoluble unity, and sanctifies them on the way to eternal life.”

McDonald says Catholics who read such books as Burns’ — and there are countless similar-sounding evangelical titles on the market — need to look past marketing and entertaining anecdotes to the theological principles beneath the advice.

“Christian marriage and family principles,” he says, “must be greater than the sum of their bullet points.”

But that’s not to say that, just because a resource is offered by a Catholic publisher or distributor, its advice is to be embraced, no questions asked.

Grace Begets

Discernment must rule the day, for Catholic works can fall short, too, notes Popcak. He points out that some Catholic materials emphasize theological teachings at the expense of actionable suggestions.

Yet, rather than recommend Protestant resources, Popcak favors such secular texts as Why Marriages Succeed or Fail by John Gottman of the Marriage Research Institute (Simon & Schuster, 1995). “I almost prefer this because it’s not coming with the Calvinist baggage,” says Popcak, who adds that Gottman “is not antithetical or hostile to faith; he just doesn’t take a position.”

Kimberly Hahn, a former evangelical Protestant and co-author with her husband, Scott, of Life-Giving Love: Embracing God’s Beautiful Design for Marriage, says she thinks Catholics still have a lot of ground to cover in producing and marketing better materials on marriage and family life.

She says she and her husband wrote their book to set Catholic teaching on openness to life in the context of God’s design for marriage.

“Sometimes we will latch onto a very important truth and, if it isn’t put into the overall context of marriage, we can skew the message,” she explains.

“Some have understood they should not use contraception or sterilize, but they haven’t understood all the joy in being co-creators of life.”

Hahn says such concerns motivated her to work on Life-Nurturing Love, a new series of books and videotaped Bible studies for St. Anthony Messenger Press. The series, which will debut in the spring and is partly based on the 31st chapter of Proverbs, will examine the vocation of wife and mother, looking at what a woman of faith desires for her marriage, her children, her home and her world.

“What Pope John Paul II talked a lot about and is being echoed by Pope Benedict XVI is that marriage is a vocation, a call, a call to holiness,” says Hahn. “There is a lot involved in it and it’s much bigger than merging bank accounts. In recognizing the grace of the sacrament, an entirely new family is formed in husband and wife.”

Resources for building up and strengthening Christ-centered marriages: They’re not just for evangelical Protestants any more.

Not that they ever really were.

Judy Roberts writes from

Graytown, Ohio.