Deep within the quiet, sun-dappled sanctuary of St. Helen’s Catholic Church in Vero Beach, Florida, a delicate conversation unfolds dozens of times a year, carrying a weight that is both deeply personal and profoundly countercultural. When Father Matt DeGance sits across from young, hopeful couples preparing to cross the threshold into holy matrimony, he inevitably delivers a challenge that causes modern sensibilities to grind to a sudden, screeching halt. He asks them—even those already sharing a home, a mortgage, and a cat—to commit to six months of absolute sexual abstinence before their wedding day. This request does not invoke legalistic condemnation, but rather invites them into a sacred, reflective pause; yet, the immediate reaction in the room is often a heavy, palpable silence. Father Matt describes this reaction as a complex blend of quiet pensiveness, where couples suddenly find themselves staring down the barrel of an ancient standard they never expected to encounter in the twenty-first century. While some couples dismiss the advice with a nervous laugh or treat it as a quaint, impractical relic of a bygone era, others are visibly arrested by the gravity of the spiritual invitation. The sheer countercultural nature of this pastoral guidance cannot be overstated in an era where public health data indicates that only five to ten percent of American brides and grooms are virgins when they stand at the altar. To suggest that a modern couple should put the physical aspect of their relationship on hold is to speak a completely foreign language to a generation reared on the gospel of sexual compatibility and immediate gratification. Father Matt, however, understands that this silent tension is not merely a barrier, but an essential workspace where couples must reckon with what it truly means to love another person outside the boundaries of physical performance. By subverting the modern script, he challenges them to construct a relational foundation made of words, shared values, and deep emotional trust, rather than relying on structural physical intimacy to mask the vulnerabilities of their souls. This demanding invitation forces a profound confrontation with contemporary dating dogmas, asking young lovers to trade the temporary comfort of physical proximity for the enduring, spiritual architecture of a lifelong covenant.
Despite the initial shock of these traditional expectations, St. Helen’s is currently witnessing an astonishing, vibrant renaissance that directly challenges the narrative of a dying institutional faith. This year alone, the parish is on track to host forty to fifty weddings, a dramatic escalatory surge from previous years that Father Matt attributes to a quiet but unmistakable religious revival sweeping through segments of the Catholic Church. Young people, weary of the isolation and transient nature of secular culture, are flocking back to the sacraments in record numbers, bringing with them a hunger for stability, ritual, and a definitive moral anchor. Interestingly, this uptick in marital commitments reveals a fascinating shift in the living arrangements of modern pre-cana participants. Currently, seventy percent of the engaged couples seeking counseling at the parish are cohabitating, a number that sounds remarkably high, but is actually a significant decrease from just five years prior. Father Matt recalls a time not long ago when witnessing a couple who maintained separate residences before their wedding day was so incredibly rare that they felt like an endangered species—almost a museum exhibit to be admired from behind glass files without touching. Today, however, more and more couples are choosing to live apart until marriage, a quiet trend that Father Matt credits to the transformative partnership between local parishes and a dedicated, non-profit ministry designed to rebuild the very foundations of human relationships. This slow, steady tide of change suggests that when given the proper theological and practical tools, today’s youth are willing to push back against the standard drift of cohabitation. They are beginning to suspect that the highly commercialized, casual approaches to dating and living together may not be delivering the lifelong security and happiness that they were promised by modern social scripts, driving them back to the ancient structures of the church to heal the fractures in their romantic lives.
At the heart of this grassroots movement to heal modern relationships is Communio, a pioneering non-profit organization founded by JP DeGance, Father Matt’s brother, which operates on the front lines of what they term a marriage and faith crisis. Communio’s foundational mission is to walk alongside churches, equipping them with data-driven strategies and pastoral frameworks to help young people cultivate healthier, more resilient relationships before they ever reach the altar. The philosophy driving their work is grounded in a stark sociological reality: there is an undeniable, direct cause-and-effect relationship between the decline of the traditional family and the decline of religious faith. For generations, the primary incubator of religious faith has not been the Sunday school classroom or the church pew, but the family dinner table presided over by stability and joint parental commitment. Communio’s research reveals that the vast majority of regular churchgoers today are raised in stable, two-parent households, demonstrating that the future of religious faith itself hinges on the survival of healthy marriages. Sadly, the vast majority of modern American congregations are suffering from a blind spot in this area, leaving young people to navigate the treacherous waters of romance completely on their own without spiritual tools. According to comprehensive research commissioned by Communio and the Barna Group, eighty-five percent of all churches surveyed spend absolutely nothing on marriage and relationship ministries, while only twenty-eight percent offer any substantive support in this critical area. JP DeGance emphasizes that if churches wish to reverse the empty pews of tomorrow, they must radically invest in the marriages of today. By treating marriage as a vital, active ministry rather than a mere ceremonial service, Communio is helping parishes transition from passive observers of societal decay into active engines of marital health, providing young couples with the emotional armor needed to withstand the pressures of a highly fractured world.
The DeGance brothers’ dedication to this work is deeply colored by their own upbringing in a vibrant, faith-filled household of six siblings where prayer and service were the natural rhythms of daily life. Raised by parents who modeled a cohesive, generational faith, Father Matt and JP grew up attending Mass weekly, praying the family rosary daily, participating in monthly confession, and serving side-by-side at local soup kitchens. This immersive spiritual environment instilled in them a profound understanding of marriage as an intrinsically sacrificial, communal covenant rather than an individualistic arrangement of convenience. In stark contrast to this stable model, modern culture has embraced cohabitation as an almost mandatory trial period for marriage, operating under the flawed assumption that testing the waters reduces the risk of future divorce. JP DeGance points out that four decades of sociological data consistently reveal the exact opposite: couples who live together before marriage experience a staggering sixty to eighty percent higher divorce rate than those who do not. The myth of cohabitation is built on a misunderstanding of what marriage actually is; while trial living prioritizes ease of exit, marriage requires a radical, sacrificial surrender of individualism to build a unified, whole-life oneness. Father Matt notes that living together before taking vows essentially trains couples in a sort of conditional commitment, because they always keep one foot out of the door just in case things go wrong. If you are always looking for a potential exit strategy, you never actually learn the hard, messy, and deeply rewarding work of self-sacrifice that sustains a marriage through the inevitable storms of life, leaving the relationship perpetually fragile and prone to collapse under pressure.
To illustrate the hidden danger of cohabitation, JP DeGance employs a powerful, illuminating metaphor of two people trying to navigate a small rowboat together. When a couple cohabitates, it is as if each person is sitting on opposite edges of the boat with one leg dangling over the side in the water, mentally prepared to jump ship at the first sign of rough currents. Because neither partner is fully committed to staying inside the vessel, the boat remains highly unstable, moves poorly, and fails to make real progress toward a shared destination, leaving both individuals feeling secretly insecure. This culture of conditional commitment is further exacerbated by the rise of modern dating apps, which JP argues treat human beings like disposable commodities to be scrolled through, rated, and exchanged like a pair of shoes ordered on Amazon Prime. This transactional, cost-benefit mindset strips romance of its sacred character, turning potential life partners into mere products and reducing love to a consumer transaction. In contrast to this commodification, Father Matt asserts that a return to chastity is not only a realistic expectation for modern couples, but a deeply liberating one that women often embrace with relief, while men readily follow a strong spiritual lead. For cohabitating couples who are willing to try, he often suggests the practical, challenging compromise of sleeping in separate rooms during their engagement period to honor their upcoming vows. To support this effort, he introduces couples to Pope John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body,” a beautiful theological framework that teaches that sexual desire is not a dirty appetite to be suppressed, but a holy, healthy, and beautiful gift to be reverenced. By framing sexuality as an expression of total self-giving, Father Matt helps young couples see that physical restraint before marriage is not a puritanical punishment, but a radical act of love that honors the sacred dignity of their future spouse.
Looking back over the cultural landscape of the past half-century, it becomes clear that the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s did not deliver the promised utopia of freedom, but instead left behind a trail of relational fragmentation that has deeply scarred subsequent generations. As JP DeGance observes, the revolution successfully decoupled sex from marriage, sex from parenting, and parenting from partnering, leading to a massive spike in non-marital households and broken families. The direct consequence of this societal shift is visible in the modern explosion of the “nones”—young people who claim absolutely no religious affiliation—who were raised in homes where the unifying thread of family faith had been unraveled. Today’s youth, however, are beginning to look at the painful, unstable fruits of this revolution and are actively searching for something better, hungering for a lasting stability that many of them never experienced in their own childhood homes. They are starting to realize that the happiest, most fulfilled people are those who build healthy, lasting marriages centered around family, children, and a shared spiritual life. Father Matt firmly believes that God’s design for marriage still offers the single best set of practices for cultivating deep, lasting human happiness, even if those practices require tremendous sacrifice and discipline. By encouraging engaged couples to say “no” to their desires today, he is helping them construct a rock-solid foundation so that their “I do” tomorrow carries the weight of a lifetime of faithful, covenantal love. Ultimately, this countercultural path proves that short-term sacrifice is a small price to pay for the priceless gift of a marriage that can endure any storm and pass a legacy of faith to the next generation.
