For most Catholics marriage is their path to holiness, says this expert. The church could-and should-do more to help them on their way.

If you ask Mary Jo Pedersen the secret to a good marriage, she just might point you to a dentist. How they think about teeth, she says, is how the rest of us should think about marriage:

"You get one set of teeth, that's it. They are of great value. If you don't take care of them, you can lose them, and it's going to cost you a lot of money and a lot of pain, so you go to the dentist and you get preventive care."

As a national leader in Catholic family ministry and faith formation, Pedersen has encouraged preventive care for marriage through workshops, publications, and retreats. She recently retired from 25 years on the staff of the Family Life Office of the Archdiocese of Omaha, and she's also served as an adviser to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Marriage and Family as they put together their forthcoming pastoral letter on marriage.

While communicating to couples the importance of ongoing marriage education and enrichment can be a challenge, Pedersen embraces it. "Marriage is life's most important work, ultimately. It's also a key investment in your health, your finances, your spiritual welfare. When you buy a new car, you take it in for an oil change every six months. Do you take your marriage in for a checkup every six months?"

Pedersen and her husband, Dave, have been married for 38 years and have three grown children.

How does the Catholic Church view marriage?
The church has a very positive vision of marriage as a happy, healthy, and holy life choice.

Today marriage is being questioned in all sorts of ways. Cohabitation is up; over a third of cohabiting couples have children in their homes, so they are moving ahead without marriage. In the past marriage gave women financial security; it offered the freedom to have sex and a place to have babies. Now people choose to have all those things without marriage.

The social sciences agree that marriage is really good for you. For men it equals giving up a pack of cigarettes a day in terms of health and life expectancy. Married couples live longer, are wealthier, and have more satisfying sex lives than those who are single, divorced, or cohabiting. Children do better when parents are married.

But what is truly unique about the church's view of marriage is that it is ultimately a pathway to salvation. Since the Second Vatican Council, the church has emphasized that in Baptism God calls everyone to holiness through different paths. God calls some people to marriage, a call that is equal in dignity to the call to the priesthood, to consecrated life, or to single life.

What value does the church's teaching on marriage offer couples?
What's lacking in our culture is a meaning system for marriage. What's the goal? If you looked at the secular world, you'd say the goal would be to have one of those vans with rear doors that open on both sides, a nice home, an investment portfolio, and the acceptance of your community. But people find that that runs out pretty fast, especially when you find out that the person you married is not perfect.

Catholic teachings on marriage function like three legs of a stool. The first leg is that marriage is a call to holiness. The church says the goal of being married is to help you develop as a whole person in the image of Christ and to give and nurture life in cooperation with God. In marriage the call to holiness involves forging a common life, an "us" who can give life to the world.

The second leg is the idea that marriage is not simply a legal contract but also a covenant. A covenant is a solemn promise to one's spouse and to God to be faithful into an unknown future. It assures us that God is always with us in this grand enterprise that is married life.

The church calls people who make this covenant to two things: The first is to love faithfully and exclusively. And to love not simply in the secular sense, which is, "I'm attracted to you, you're my preference," but to love in the spiritual sense, which is, "I see good in you and I wish good for you."

We're also called to honor our spouse, which is actually to acknowledge that Christ lives in that person. Honoring is played out in everyday life when couples respect and accept one another unconditionally. I've never met a couple who thinks this is an easy thing to do since there are no perfect spouses or marriages.

The third leg is the teaching that marriage is a sacrament, a sign of God's love in the world. When you see spouses who are faithful through the ups and downs of life and who love unselfishly and forgive graciously, you catch a glimpse of what God's love must be like.

How do cultural values challenge that view?
We live in a consumer society. The consumer attitude is that marriage is about acquiring a wife or a husband, a home, children, and all the accoutrements that go with that. Your success is based on how much you acquire.

We also live in a "me first" culture. When you are not happy or you don't feel your needs are met, you find someone else who can satisfy your needs.

What does the church offer instead?
Practically speaking, the church offers married couples a supportive community that believes in lifelong marriage in the midst of a culture that doesn't. It offers sacraments that heal and strengthen couples throughout their lives, especially the sacraments of Reconciliation and Eucharist.

It offers a different lens through which to view the ups and downs of married life. When we look through this lens, we ask questions like: What is God calling me to today? How are we building a relationship that's going to give life to the world?

You talk about how the Paschal Mystery relates to marriage. Can you explain what you mean?
Christ's dying and rising to new life is profoundly embedded in the seasons of a marriage.

After a few years of marriage my husband and I had our first child. We had to die, in a way, to much of the free time and sleep and money we enjoyed before we became parents, but we had begun an exciting and new phase of our lives.

When the babies grew up, there were many dyings and risings in our parenting years as we let go of preconceived ideas and grew into enjoying what each of our kids was becoming.

After the last child left home, we left behind the many activities and some of the friends that came with parenting, and there was another crossing over to empty nest life, which I think is God's reward for not killing off your children. It's really wonderful and it's not like going back to the beginning of marriage, either. It's a new married life full of possibilities.

These transitions I've mentioned can also be some of the most dangerous times for marriages. Studies show that marital satisfaction tends to plummet for most couples at the birth of the first child. That's why I think parishes need to have baptismal programs with marriage education to explain how to nurture the marriage after children.

How does Catholic tradition view the roles of men and women in marriage?
The Catholic Church teaches the radical equality of men and women in its vision of the marriage covenant. That doesn't mean sameness. It means that each reflects the divine in different ways. While some of our evangelical brothers and sisters maintain that men have a greater spiritual responsibility for the twosome, that's not a Catholic teaching.

Mutuality in marriage has to do with more than roles based on gender. It has to do with the discernment of gifts. My job is to help Dave increase his natural gifts and develop some gifts that he doesn't have. That's his job with me, too.

For instance, I'm a feeler. Dave's a thinker. I'm Italian; he's Danish. He's very calm, and I'm very emotional. I'm spontaneous, and he's a planner. After 38 years, I've learned about planning from him, and he is much better at being spontaneous. Our partnership is strengthened by our differences.

In your book you talk about the spiritual disciplines of marriage. What are you referring to? Spiritual disciplines are actions taken to promote community and to honor or worship God. All vocations have spiritual disciplines. For example, in the monastic life monks get up early to pray. It's a way to worship God, but it's also part of their common life.

Like all vocations, marriage has many of these disciplines, and they may be different for each couple.