The Gift of Family Life
A Knight reflects on marriage, joy and participating in the 10th World Meeting of Families
By Damon Owens9/1/2022
Damon and Melanie Owens stand with five of their eight children — left to right, Collette, Nathan, Olivia, Leah and Veronica — in front of St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican during the World Meeting of Families on June 25. Photo courtesy of Damon Owens
An exuberant throng of Catholic families from around the globe gathers for the World Meeting of Families nearly every three years. Established in 1994 by St. John Paul II, the event has varied in size, depending on the venue and circumstances. This year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, participation at the 10th World Meeting was limited to 2,000 families. Nonetheless, delegations from 120 countries traveled to Rome, coming together June 22-26 under the theme “Family Life: A Vocation and Path to Holiness.”
More than a dozen families joined the U.S. delegation, led by Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, who serves as chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth. Damon and Melanie Owens made the journey with five of their eight children, thanks in part to financial support from Damon’s brother Knights in St. Patrick Council 15346 in Kennett Square, Pa., and a grant from the Supreme Council.
In the past three decades, Damon and Melanie have trained more than 20,000 couples in marriage preparation, natural family planning and theology of the body. They were presenters at the 2015 World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia, and in 2020 they founded Joyful Ever After, a Catholic ministry to renew and transform marriages.
Damon also served as the first executive director of the Theology of the Body Institute and was awarded the Benemerenti Medal by Pope Francis in 2018 for his service to the Church in support of marriage and family. He spoke with Columbia about his journey of faith, his work and his family’s experience at the recent meeting in Rome.
‘REAL, AUTHENTIC LOVE’
Melanie and I were both cradle Catholics, and the faith was always part of our lives growing up — she in California and I in New Jersey. But going to college in the ’80s and then graduate school, we each drifted away from the faith — not being angry, not having a particular issue with the Church, but just being absorbed and distracted by the secular culture, mainly around sexuality and relationships.
God brought us together at the University of California at Berkeley, of all places, where we fell deeply in love. And it was there that we also reached a crisis where everything we’d experienced in college — all of our beliefs around intimacy and relationships and marriage — failed us. We were both, in our unique way, broken. Because what we wanted was real, authentic love, we made an affirmative decision to stop having sex and to come back to the Church. It was an incredibly difficult two-year journey, but it drew us so much closer to each other by coming closer to Christ and the Church.
That journey led us not just to the altar in 1993, but also launched us into a passion to want to learn more, to teach more, to be around our peers and other couples. We immediately went into marriage preparation training, learned natural family planning, became teachers in the first six months of our marriage, and started telling our story of coming back to the faith — how we learned to express our sexual love for each other in a way that God delights in.
We saw the impact this had on our peers in those early years, and we saw the great need. As we started to study more theology, I was introduced to John Paul II’s theology of the body and Familiaris Consortio, which opened up a whole world of explanation, understanding and coherence.
It revealed an unending beauty about who we are, why we’re here, and what marriage is in God’s salvation plan.
All of these years of ministry led up to a surprise invitation in February from Archbishop Cordileone and the good folks at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to be part of the U.S. delegation to the World Meeting of Families.
“Being a better husband, being a better father is directly related to becoming a saint, to our own personal holiness, but also to drawing our families, our communities and the world to that holiness.”
MEETING IN JOY
Concretely, our ministry work has involved an attentiveness to couples who don’t have a strong foundation of faith, yet who are close enough to the Church that they’re coming to priests and Catholic lay apostolates and therapists for help.
This attentiveness has helped us to see divorce and cohabitation and all these statistics we track as more than abstract problems. Couples are really, really hurting. The statistics are real, but the ministry isn’t to change the world’s divorce rate; the ministry is walking with a couple, as many couples as you can, and opening your life to them. that’s really the heart of our new Joyful Ever After ministry.
Joy has been a key theme in our work. As much as you focus on love — and we need to, for it’s the center of everything — joy is something you can’t fake, it just wells up within. And everybody wants joy, not just happiness, not just peace in the sense of quiet. People want a joyful life.
So joy has been a connection I’ve had with Pope Francis and the language he uses, from Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel) to Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love). At this World Meeting of Families, joy was very much front and center in the witness stories — either the lack of joy or the desire for it or the wounds around it. The theme of joy permeated the witness stories of these couples from around the world.
It was literally a World Meeting of Families, with couples from African and Asian countries, South American and European countries. And it was eye- and heart-opening to learn how much we have in common. Under the visual and obvious differences between nations and cultures and families, there was something very real about our Catholic faith that tied us together. Also uniting us are the common issues that we’re dealing with: unity within the family, peace and love as a husband and a wife, communication, misunderstanding, wounds, infidelity to God and to each other, the difficulty in parenting.
To hear from a family from Nigeria or the Philippines or Poland, and to hear the same struggles — with nuanced differences, but the same aching, the same longing — was very beautiful and powerful.
ON THE FRONTLINES
I was pleased to discover that of the delegate couples from around the United States, most of the men were members of the Knights of Columbus. That clearly was not intentional, but I think it speaks volumes both to who the Knights attract and to who is working to build marriage and family in the U.S. I was like, “Man, look how many Knights are working on these frontline issues and have been recognized for their work.”
I’ve been a member of the Knights for a while, and there’s a power in the Order’s advocacy for the good, the true, and the beautiful when it comes to marriage and to family. And I think the Supreme Council has done invaluable work in being a consistent advocate for the goodness of fatherhood and for what marriage is. Some of it is the Faith in Action programs; some of it is informational, such as Columbia, and highlighting what is essential and irreplaceable.
Because I travel quite a bit around the country, no matter where I go, I’m meeting brother Knights who are involved either in hosting events or attending events. Knights are everywhere, and I love it. These are my brothers and we’re consistently working together.
This may sound trite, but one of the beautiful things about our brotherhood is that we grow where God has put us. We bloom where we’re planted. Not everyone is called to go to a World Meeting of Families; not everyone is called to be in politics or to be business owners; but every Knight has a circle of influence. In that circle of influence, there is something that will be directly impacted by us prioritizing our marriage, doing our work, being courageous, and sacrificing in a way that may not get headlines. It is the part of cultural change that the Knights of Columbus was founded for.
Being a better husband, being a better father is directly related to becoming a saint, to our own personal holiness, but also to drawing our families, our communities and the world to that holiness.