Search Results: valentine

Marriage Week Campaign

By Laura C / November 28, 2024

Celebrating Marriage Week 7th – 14th of Feb 2025 This year’s theme “Pursuing a Lasting Love” Below are four ideas to encourage couples to invest in their relationship. Intentional Couple’s Micro-Course (FREE) St Valentine’s Day Handout (FREE) Marriage Enrichment  Support for Spouses in Troubled Marriages Give them a FREE Gift: The Intentional Couple Micro-Course What…

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The Intentional Couple Micro Course for Leaders

By Laura C / October 10, 2024

The Intentional Couple Micro-Course Leaders Info If your community celebrates: 1. An Anniversary Mass for couples 2. St Valentine’s Day Mass 3. Any other occassion (e.g. Marriage enrichment retreat, Family Mass). We would like to offer a FREE Gift for your married couples… The Intentional Couple Micro-Course. Promotional Brochure We have 2 versions of this…

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Called to Greatness

By Francine & Byron Pirola / April 26, 2024

The word ‘vocation’ comes from the Latin ‘vocare’ which means ‘to call’. Our primary vocation, the one we all share, is the vocation to holiness. We are called to follow Christ and be in relationship with him. From the Pope to a newborn – it is the same call and equally compelling. A secondary vocation…

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Lent: the ultimate change-maker

By Francine & Byron Pirola / February 16, 2024

Like most people, our optimistic resolutions for the New Year tend to fizzle out before the end of January. Thankfully, Lent gives us another, and a better, chance of success. Here are three ways to give our marriages a Lenten make-over based on three traditional practices – fasting, prayer and almsgiving. 1: Fast… from criticism…

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Five Strategies to Improve your Marriage

By Francine & Byron Pirola / June 9, 2023

Is it possible to improve a troubled marriage without the cooperation of our spouse? Read on for our top five strategies to improve your marriage. A lot of people feel trapped in a dissatisfying or troubled marriage. They feel powerless to ‘fix’ it because their spouse refuses to join them in counselling or a marriage…

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Made for More

By Francine & Byron Pirola / February 10, 2023

For two decades we’ve promoted the idea of putting the ‘saint’ back into St Valentine’s Day. Every year we blog, pin, post, and remind the Catholic networks in our database of the day’s origin and significance. It’s become so much of a habit it now feels strange for us to mention the event without ‘saint’…

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#1 Marriage as a Mission

By Francine & Byron Pirola / May 25, 2022

What does it mean to make ‘marriage our mission’? With our guest, Philipa Caulfield, we break it down and explore how we’ve done it and why we need it. Guest: Philipa Caulfield, with her husband Luke, are SmartLoving super-sponsors. They’ve been accompanying engaged couples for over ten years and have featured in some of the…

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Smiling Saints

By Francine & Byron Pirola / February 10, 2022

St Valentine is the one saint with a feast day (Feb 14) that is known by millions of people, including non-Christians. But how many know why he is a saint?   The back story is that Valentine, a Roman priest at the time of Claudius II, was imprisoned for conducting secret weddings against the orders of…

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Listening is the Music of Love

By Francine & Byron Pirola / September 30, 2021

One of the most supremely loving gestures we can give another is to listen to them. Yet for most of us, being listened to is a rare experience. What makes it so hard to give this simple gift to each other? We remember those days so well. The early romance days. Living in two different…

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The M-Team

By Isabella Garcia / July 16, 2021

Building a Parish Marriage Ministry If families are the foundation of the society and marriage is the core relationship in the family, there’s an important parish ministry required if we are to have any hope of strengthen society. Church communities have much to offer in establishing local marriage initiatives but they need coordination and focussed…

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