Martins near finish line as CEE presenting couple

It’s not as if the first nine years of marriage were unhappy, said Dave and Antonia Martin. Clashes were rare and without rancor; husband and wife continued to enjoy each other’s company and the shared mission of raising their two young boys. They had even agreed to try and expand their family by seeking to adopt a child to join their pleasant home.

Life was pretty good, said the couple, but they realized what they were missing only after they began to practice their Catholic faith.

“We were the C&Es who only went to Mass on Christmas and Easter,” Antonia said. “We had a great marriage, but we didn’t have God in our marriage.”

When that changed, however, life seemed to shift from black and white into full, vivid technicolor. The experience was so transformative, the Martins said, it blossomed into a desire to help other couples place God at the center of their lives. Now, 45 years later, they are preparing to help present one last Catholic Engaged Encounter (CEE) weekend before retiring as presenters.

“They have definitely presented longer than any other team in the Diocese of Wichita,” said fellow CEE presenter Mary Kay Rott, who serves alongside her husband, Chris, as the ministry’s local coordinator.
In addition, Dave and Antonia served as diocesan coordinators and four years on the national board for CEE.

“We just enjoy giving the weekends,” Dave said. “We enjoy conversing with the other presenting couples and the priests. We get to hear each other’s stories, and it is rewarding to hear the engaged couples’ stories too, especially when they tell us the weekend has helped deepen their love for each other and for God.”

The origin story
As a culinary school student in March 1966, young Dave took one look at the roomful of medical secretary students to whom he and his classmates would be delivering lunch and immediately knew where to go. “The minute I saw her, she was going to be the one I’d take my food to,” he said.
“He brought all his food to me for a couple days,” Antonia said.

That same week she accepted his invitation for a date and they went to a Wichita lounge.

Their courtship became a whirlwind when Dave graduated and took a job as the food service director at Marymount College in Salina. Antonia got a job at St. John’s Hospital in the same city. They were married that same year and began their pleasant, albeit incomplete, life together.

Their first son, Anthony, came along in 1968, followed by Jason in 1970.

Everything changed in 1976, when some friends returned from a Catholic Marriage Encounter (CME) weekend. That same week, they also received a package in the mail informing them they were accepted as the adoptive parents of a three-year-old daughter, Denise.

The Martins’ CME experience helped them recognize a spiritual void. “That weekend, we saw what we had missed out on,” Dave said. “It was a revelation that just blossomed.”

Almost immediately, Dave said, they were knocking on the rectory door of the parish in their new hometown of Derby. “We said we wanted to put our kids in school at St. Mary’s, which is where all our children attended school through eighth grade,” he said. “We asked God’s forgiveness for the first nine years and started going to Mass regularly.”

Eventually, Fr. Tom Stroot urged them to consider volunteering to help present CEE weekends.

They accepted the challenge by 1980 and helped present nine weekends during their first year. The best part, they said, was seeing young engaged couples experience transformations that reminded them of their own. Sometimes that evidence arose years later during a chance encounter in public, but at other times it was clear by the retreat’s end.

“When the weekend is starting, you can see how hesitant the couples are,” Dave said. “As the weekend progresses, it gives us so much joy to see the light bulb go on for some couples. They come talk with us during meals or breaks and tell us about it.”

Diving deep
A CEE retreat encourages engaged couples to discuss topics that should not go unaddressed before the wedding, including important beliefs, wounds, attitudes, and experiences. Although shedding light on such formative matters can strengthen a couples’ bond and deepen their intimacy, the Martins said, it also is not unheard of for couples to emerge from that fraught territory with the realization that they shouldn’t tie the knot. As wrenching as such a parting may be in the moment, Antonia said, it pales in comparison with the alternative.

“We have run into people who were on our weekends who tell us they did not marry the person they made a weekend with,” she said. “That is not a failure. We tell them it’s better to discover these problems now than after you have four kids together.”

Of course, the vast majority of couples who attend a weekend together do get married, the Martins said, and not only does the weekend help each spouse better know and understand the other, it also can help them learn to make loving decisions and improve their communication.

However, the presenting team has little hope of prompting reticent couples to dive deep unless its members are willing to do the same. That means some of the presentations delve into emotional territory, the Martins said, and over countless presentations during the course of decades, Dave always struggled to keep his composure when their presentation turned to the subject of their adopted daughter, Denise.

An act of love
But the willingness to open up about it before a room full of people is not only an act of love for the couples making the retreat, they said, it also flows more naturally because the priest and other couple on the presenting team also make themselves similarly vulnerable. Therefore, presenting teams tend to forge strong and lasting bonds.

And after nearly half a century, those are many such bonds. Catholic Diocese of Wichita Director of Development and Planned Giving, as well as of Support for Catholic Mike Wescott said the Martins were one of the first couples they met in 1980 when he and his wife, Therese were asked to help present CEE weekends. “Since then, they have become some of our best friends,” he said. “Their love for the Church, commitment to their sacrament and family have been ever-present to us and inspired us to be better Catholics ourselves. They have given so much to the promotion of CEE that will impact this ministry for many years.”

Becky Knapp, program coordinator of natural family planning for the diocese’s Office of Marriage & Family Life, who also helps present CEE weekends alongside her husband, Rob, who is president of Kapaun Mt. Carmel High School, said she always sees Dave and Antonia together. “They are a team, they embody, ‘The two shall become one,’” she said. “They presented with the Wescotts on our CEE weekend in December 1986. We did not know them at all before that weekend. They came to our wedding and are on the video encouraging us together.”

The final stretch
After they help present their final CEE retreat this month, the Martins said they would not miss certain aspects of the weekends. The late nights and early starts sandwiched around hours of presentations tend to be demanding for couples of any age, Antonia said, but have gotten more so in recent years.
“I told Dave I am not going to be giving weekends when I am 80,” she said.

The weekend’s format has evolved over the years, especially in the Wichita diocese, they note, which sometimes requires presenters to overhaul their remarks. Instead of tackling that rewrite, they said, it seemed like a logical time to retire. Even so, Dave and Antonia said they planned to remain involved with CEE ways that do not entail presenting.

As they look back, they note other changes that have taken shape in their years with CEE. Antonia said that in their first years, the vast majority of attending couples were much younger. “Our first weekend, there was someone in their late 20s and everyone else was 18 to 20,” she said. “Now most of the couples are either out of college or finishing up.”

One thing that has not changed, however, is the weekend’s ability to help attendees learn to invite God into their lives. That, Dave said, will always be their favorite aspect, and is a selling point they mention when they encourage other strong Catholic couples to consider volunteering as presenters.
“Seeing that light bulb go on,” David said. “That’s our favorite thing.”