Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 25, 2025 /
18:27 pm
In a bid to help strengthen marriages across the state, the California Catholic Conference (CCC)
has launched its first-ever statewide partnership with Communio, a nonprofit organization that equips parishes to “evangelize through the renewal of healthy relationships, marriages, and families.”
News of the agreement follows the CCC’’s efforts over the past year to promote marriage and family through its “Radiate Love” initiative, which is set to end on Sept. 26 with a marriage summit in Oakland, where the CCC’s partnership with Communio will officially launch.
“The goal is to quantifiably strengthen marriage, either by self-reported happiness in marriage, by rising marriage rates, or by encouraging people to marry,” Communio’s director of church growth, Damon Owens, told CNA.
Ordinarily, Communio partners on a diocesan and parish level to build out the most optimal version of its Full Circle Relationship Ministry Model to suit the needs of the community. Owens said he was inspired about a year and a half ago by the Radiate Love initiative to reach out to the conference about a partnership.
After speaking with California Catholic Conference Executive Director Kathleen Domingo for some months and traveling to California to deliver talks centered on the theology of the body and marriage and family issues, the partnership — which includes all 12 bishops and dioceses in the state — came to fruition.
The agreement, Owens said, marks the first time that every bishop across an entire state has bought in to bringing the program to every parish in his diocese.
“Every parish in California will now have access to Communio’s relationship ministry model, which is credited with a 24% drop in the divorce rate in Jacksonville, Florida,” the conference said in an Aug. 20 press release announcing the arrangement.
“I’ve been watching the progression of Communio over the years and hearing really great things from our marriage and family life directors, who have always told us that Communio is the gold standard,” Domingo said in the release.
She added: “If they could have any tool in their toolbox to help parishioners and parish families, it would be Communio.”
“In John 10:10, the Lord said that he came so that we would have life and have it more abundantly. We know that strong marriages and healthy families help us to have this abundant life, so we are excited to partner with Communio,” Auxiliary Bishop Timothy Freyer of the Diocese of Orange and executive officer for the CCC also said in the release.
Inside the data-driven effort to reach parishioners
“The core of what we offer is data insight to know what the problems are, but also access to technology and consulting that helps to build a plan of events and encounters where new people come to the parish and parishioners themselves want to come,” he explained.
“We have a unique technology that helps to do both the data gathering but also determining which programs are a good fit for them,” Owens continued. “So part of the consulting is literally going through almost like an Amazon page where you’re selecting facilitator-led programs or on your own or workbook or group or individual.”
Communio provides programs tailored to one of four areas: singles, marriage preparation, marriage enrichment, and marriage in crisis. They work with a team of five to six people in a parish to build a calendar of events for the year in a sequence that best helps “to draw people into the Church, but addresses the top needs first.”
“It’s a very customized way of making sure that they get the results that they want because people are telling us what their needs are through the surveys,” he said, noting that this addresses the “deepest concern” for pastors regarding the “specific needs that their people have.”
“California represents probably the whole spectrum of the type of parishes that we work around the country. You’ve got the poor rural, you’ve got the wealthy suburbs, you’ve got big cities, you’ve got mountains, you’ve got large parishes, small parishes,” Owens pointed out.
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“I think for each of those pastors, they want to know, is investing in Communio to invest in those marriages going to bring to them the success that we’ve been able to achieve around the country?” he said. “And that’s why we’re so confident and excited about it, because we know that we can.”
Madalaine Elhabbal is a staff reporter for Catholic News Agency based at EWTN’s Washington, D.C., bureau.
