By gathering long-married and soon-to-be wed couples in a living room setting, St. Brigid's brings home the church's teachings about love and marriage

THE QUESTION for the small group of engaged couples seemed simple enough: In their marriages, what would they do about credit cards?

It was one of several questions posed by two married couples who were leading a Pre-Cana group for Catholic couples preparing to be married at St. Brigid's Church in Westbury. The object was to get the couples talking about their relationship. But Ron and Mary Grossi, who were hosting this session in their basement, didn't expect the answer they got.

One man spoke up and said that they wouldn't be using credit cards. His fiancee disagreed. "She said, `Of course we're going to have charge cards. In fact, I have two now, and I have $20,000 on them,' " Mary recalled. "I think he was in shock. The only thing I remember him saying was: 'And you will pay that off before we get married.' "

The questions don't usually evoke such pyrotechnics. But that answer, early in the Grossis' 16 years of Pre-Cana work, shows how the process can help. "We felt if that question hadn't been there," Mary said, "they might have gone all the way to the altar and gotten married without him finding out."

Sometimes, after the self-examination that Pre-Cana fosters, couples decide not to marry. "Now is the time to break it off, if it is not meant to be, rather than wait," said Herb Doscher, who has been a Pre-Cana volunteer for 15 years, with his wife, Sandy.

In the Doschers' first group, one young woman decided that the marriage was a bad idea. The groom-to-be telephoned the Doschers, frantic. "He wanted us to call her and convince her to go back to him," Herb recalled. "We said, `We can't do that. That's what the whole purpose of this is. We are here to make sure that you're not doing something that's wrong.' It was hard. It really was."

Virtually every diocese requires engaged couples to undergo some form of marriage preparation program before they can be married in the Catholic church. Pre-Cana, named after the site of the first recorded miracle of Jesus, the changing of water into wine at the wedding at Cana, is perhaps the most familiar term for marriage preparation. A more recent development is Engaged Encounter, an intensive weekend experience for engaged couples. In either case, the goal is to prepare the couples, not to break them up. But honest discussion can produce that result.

At St. Brigid's, the program begins with an opening liturgy and general meeting. It also closes with two general events: a night of prayer one week and a concluding mass the following week. In between, in a series of four small-group sessions, four to six engaged couples in each group meet in the homes of two married couples to discuss communication, conscience formation, sexuality and spirituality.

Young couples don't initially find it easy to discuss these issues with married couples they've just met. But this approach, with engaged couples in dialogue with married couples, offers a better chance of improving the relationship than the old system did.

Before their marriage in 1969, the Grossis attended a Pre-Cana conference in Queens that lasted three or four hours. "It seemed like a very long time -- I mean, to be talked at," Mary Grossi said. The engaged couples sat passively in a large group, without married couples. "A young priest spoke for most of the afternoon, and then a doctor came in with some charts and talked about sexuality," Ron Grossi said. "No dialogue at all."

The experience of the Doschers, who teamed with the Grossis in this spring's Pre-Cana cycle, was even more cursory: an hour with a priest in an upstate rectory in 1968. He asked them if they'd raise their children Catholic, even though Herb was Protestant. They said yes. "Then he told my husband that it really wasn't important that he convert, as long as he's the best Methodist he can be and I'm the best Catholic I can be," Sandy said. "That was the extent."

Sometimes the program entailed a session with a married couple, but in a large room, with no real opportunity for intimate dialogue. "It was totally impersonal, it was totally boring, and it was totally dictatorial," said Msgr. Frederick Schaefer, who ran the religious education program and the family life bureau for the Diocese of Rockville Centre in the 1960s and early 1970s. "It was felt that there had to be a better way of communication."

The key move was taking Pre-Cana out of large halls and putting it into the homes of married couples. The germ of this idea came from the way St. Thomas More parish in Hauppauge had reshaped its high school religious education program.

Meeting in the parish's large public room, in a former factory, the St. Thomas More program had dropped from 150 students to 35. In 1970, the Rev. John Cervini asked some married couples to "open their homes to the kids one night a week and just love them to death," discussing values, scripture and anything else the teenagers felt important. The RAP (Religion and People) program drew 35 students the first night and 400 in the second year. "The word started to spread," said Cervini, who tried it again when he was transferred to St. Martin of Tours in Amityville. He is now pastor of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal in Wyandanch.

Schaefer liked Cervini's in-home approach and began applying it to Pre-Cana. Then, in 1975, Schaefer left the diocesan staff and became pastor of St. Brigid's. There he started recruiting couples for an in-home Pre-Cana ministry. The Doschers and the Grossis were among the volunteers.

For the Doschers, the impetus to join was a request from Schaefer, who also played a pivotal role in Herb's conversion to Catholicism. For the Grossis, the path to Pre-Cana ran through Marriage Encounter, a program designed to help couples communicate better and strengthen good marriages. After an encounter weekend, they were anxious to become more involved in the parish. They chose to work in Schaefer's Pre-Cana program.

"His program became the model for the diocese and beyond the diocese," said the Rev. John White, who worked in the parish as a seminarian in 1980-82 and again later, as a priest.

But over the years, the number of married couples has dropped off. All parish ministries wax and wane, as volunteers grow tired or move on to other ministries. "So many leaders who began in Pre-Cana are now doing other things," said White, the moderator of the program under Schaefer's successor as pastor, Msgr. Francis X. Gaeta, who arrived in 1989. And recruiting new couples isn't easy, because in so many marriages both husband and wife work. The program is down to between 20 and 26 married couples, from a high of about 55, Ron Grossi said. The Grossis coordinate Pre-Cana, with another couple, Dick and Diane McIver.

Now that White has left the parish to work at Catholic Charities, Gaeta and the Rev. Michael Maffeo are moderating Pre-Cana together and hoping for a new burst of energy. Gaeta cares about Pre-Cana because young families are one of his top priorities, and the program is about giving new marriages the strongest possible start.

"The plan of God is that in each of your relationships the church is born again," Gaeta said at the first general meeting for the spring cycle, after mass on a Sunday late in April. "The building block of the church is the Christian family."

For the engaged couples in that room, the program could be "four of the most important weeks of your life," Gaeta told them. Pre-Cana is mandatory, and some couples grumble about it, taking an attitude that Gaeta described as: "What have they got to tell me? We're in love. Nobody has ever been as in love as we are." Gaeta conceded the uniqueness of each relationship, but argued that they can profit by exposure to the "wisdom of the community," found in the married couples.

In the group of five young couples who went through Pre-Cana with the Doschers and Grossis this spring, some were more talkative than others, but none of them displayed hostility to the process. One couple, Michael Rafanelli and Stephanie Ann Vivona, were positively eager. "We were looking forward to having Pre-Cana that was structured and not one afternoon, as some churches do," Michael said.

In recent years, most engaged couples in Pre-Cana have seemed mature. "They're so much more sophisticated now," Sandy Doscher said. "They have their careers on course, they have their houses bought. They're set." In fact, Michael and Stephanie Ann not only have firm ideas about where they're going, but an engaging sense of mission. "I believe God put us together," she said.

Stephanie Ann had grown up in Bayville and moved to Westbury at 15 with her father, when her parents separated. Michael grew up in Holliswood. They were both Catholic, but she had attended public schools and he had been in Catholic schools through college.

They first met on Feb. 9, 1991, while visiting a mutual friend, Michael Terranova, in his hospital room. "I knew when I met him there was something special," Stephanie Ann said. Michael was intrigued, but Terranova thought their age difference might be a problem. She was nearly 21, and he was 19. Eventually, Stephanie Ann told Terranova he could give her phone number to Michael. He called her immediately, and they talked for 45 minutes. That was June 7, 1991. "I know all the dates," she said. On their first date, they saw the film "City Slickers," then sat in the car for three hours, talking.

Three years later, on the day that Stephanie Ann graduated from Queens College, Michael asked her to marry him. The engagement was not a surprise. "I knew on our first date that we were going to get married," Stephanie Ann said. The timing, however, caught her off guard. So did his method of making the proposal: He bought her a VCR for her graduation, played a romantic videotape about their relationship, then knelt before her with an engagement ring.

They started planning immediately. "That's all we do, is plan," Michael said. They settled on the wedding date: Feb. 9, 1996, five years from the day they met. And they decided to see Father Mike Maffeo to make the arrangements.

"I really had only started going back to church the year before we got engaged," Stephanie Ann said. In that time, she had been drawn to Maffeo's down-to-earth style. "I just always love what he has to say," she said. "St. Brigid's makes religion, God, spirituality human. When we met him, he was in a shirt and a pair of jeans . . . He told us he could sense that there was God in our life and that there was something really special about us."

A week after the opening Pre-Cana liturgy, the Grossis opened their home on a Sunday afternoon to Michael and Stephanie Ann and four other couples: Robert Siri and Irasema Amaya, David Vargas and Adriana Mejia, Ronald Winicki and Kerry Upton, and David Schrage and Donna Verderber. This was the first of four sessions: two at the Grossi home and two at the Doschers'.

Though the married couples in Pre-Cana receive diocesan training for the program, to put the engaged couples at ease, the married couples try to make clear that their role is simply to talk about their own marriages and elicit discussion. "The whole premise of this is the honesty and the fact that we don't have a special marriage," Herb Doscher said. "We're not here to pass judgment or teach or lecture. We're just here to tell them, `This is what it's going to be like.' "

Sometimes that preview sticks with a young couple. One couple who went through Pre-Cana with the Doschers in 1991, John and Lois McCourt, still remember those talks, now that they have an active 18-month-old son, Tyler. "I remember Herb and Sandy said when they had children they set aside Thursday night every week," said John McCourt, a vice president in regional administration at Chemical Bank. "That was their date night. We just started doing that. That's something that really stuck out."

The first session this spring began with the couples describing how they met. Then they completed an "ice-breaker" questionnaire, to help them figure out how much they know about each other and where they may disagree. Finally, the Grossis asked for someone to read some questions on communication issues, and Winicki volunteered. The questions, each written on a separate piece of paper, formed the core of the four sessions.

Another key to making the discussion fruitful is the honesty of the married couples about their own ups and downs.

"I told them I can be impatient, I can be bitchy, I can be not a morning person; I tell them I'm not easy to live with," Sandy Doscher said. "There are couples that go into marriage thinking that it's going to be just as wonderful for the rest of their life as it is right now . . . That's why we tell them, this is what we've been through. This is what 27 years can bring . . . We're not divorced. We do fight, but we're still together."

For the Grossis, one of the most difficult hurdles was Mary's diabetes. The initial diagnosis came during her first pregnancy, but it wasn't until 15 years into the marriage that she began to realize that Ron didn't comprehend what the disease was doing to her emotionally.

"I wanted Ron to understand that so desperately," Mary said. "He listened and he heard it, but he just couldn't grasp it." If her blood sugar numbers were on target, he felt things were fine. "That's what I wanted him to understand, that even if everything looked okay on the outside, it didn't always feel okay on the inside. We were just starting another Pre-Cana group, and I just felt very distant from him."

Then, at the opening talk for Pre-Cana, something that Schaefer told the engaged couples struck Mary. "He said, `The married couples will teach you how to pray,' " she recalled. But she didn't feel equipped to teach prayer. "Even though we went to mass together and we had been on retreats together, we never actually formally prayed together."

So they began a habit that they still follow: Every night, before going to sleep, they hold hands and say the Lord's Prayer together. Mary no longer has the sense that Ron doesn't understand her diabetes. "And it's gotten us through even more difficult things than that," she said.

Even though the Grossis and Doschers were sharing honestly, there were times when the engaged couples seemed not to feel as comfortable sharing, such as the second session, on conscience formation, dealing with the couples' views on difficult issues such as euthanasia. "I think they sometimes feel that we're asking them what their morality is," Herb Doscher said. "They're a little bit more on guard about that."

The sexuality session can be tricky. "We were scared of it," Michael said. But it turned out fine. "It touched on topics that people don't think of when they think of sexuality," Stephanie Ann said. "It was more about being a human being. It was very spiritual also."

In the sexuality session, the conversation does not focus as much on the physical aspects of sex as on developing emotional intimacy. And it is not a forum for the married couples to beat the drum for the church's opposition to artificial contraception and abortion. The engaged couples receive written material on that teaching, but it is not a major topic of the sessions.

"We did not put our personal feelings or stands on abortion or birth control in front of them," Sandy Doscher said. "Unless we are asked directly about these matters, we don't really discuss them. I am, of course, anti-abortion, and so is my husband, but you can waste a lot of time and get into heated discussions about right to life."

The priority, in other words, is not studying doctrine but helping the engaged couples to examine their relationships intelligently and to realize the centrality of those relationships for the church and the world.

The in-home session that Michael and Stephanie Ann seemed to find the most rewarding was the final one, about spirituality. In their relationship, Michael is more knowledgeable about the facts of the faith, due to his Catholic education, but Stephanie Ann is more spiritual. "She's been like that since I met her," he said. It was just before he met her that her life turned. "God came into my life," she said, "and then He brought him into my life."

From their first date, they have talked seriously about issues, and they have a plan for life. She is studying for a master's degree in social work at Adelphi University and working with mentally ill adults at Hillside Hospital in Queens. He teaches pre-kindergarten children in special education at a private school in Brooklyn and is working on his master's in education at Queens College. But as focused as they are, they still felt Pre-Cana had something to offer. "I feel it deepened our communication to another level and made the love and the commitment even deeper," she said.

In the church's view, the program wasn't just for them, or just for the other couples. "Your marriage is a sacrament that Christ is going to use to touch the whole world," Gaeta told them on the evening of prayer after the in-home sessions were over. "There are so many people that you haven't even met yet that are going to know that there's a God of love because you're in their life. This sacrament isn't just for the both of you."

The following week, at the closing mass, Maffeo and Gaeta gave crosses to the engaged couples. Michael and Stephanie Ann plan to use theirs in the wedding ceremony next February. They also plan to attend the weddings of the other four couples in the group, as the married couples usually do.

Sitting in the back of the church at these weddings, the married couples get to see the first step on the journey. They get to hear young couples exchange words of commitment -- words that Gaeta used in crafting a good summary of what Pre-Cana really means, in his homily at an end-of-cycle liturgy just for the married couples. "When they say those words," he told the married couples who make Pre-Cana happen, "they mean more than they would have meant without you."