It would be difficult to find a deeper pedigree in the marriage and family space in all of Catholicism than that of Francine and Byron Pirola. Byron’s parents introduced Worldwide Marriage Encounter to Australia, with Francine’s parents one of the elder Pirolas’ early lead couples. The families remained fast friends, and “little sister” Francine caught Byron’s eye when he was finishing his doctorate degree in Biochemistry from Adelaide University (one of several advanced degrees and honors he’s earned).

The Pirolas married in 1988 and moved to New York for further education. There Francine completed her master’s degree in religion and religious education from Fordham University in 1990. It was in New York that the young couple had the privilege of spending time personally with Father Chuck Gallagher S.J., one of the original authors of the WWME curriculum, who mentored them and encouraged them to take up the mantle of ministering to marriages in their homeland.

“We were always interested in marriage formation because of our parents,” Francine said. “The ministry chose us. We saw the value of it from growing up.” Father Chuck’s tutelage inspired the couples’ missionary and evangelical zeal.

“Marriage is not just for life-long happiness, but a healthy marriage is central to the proclamation of the Gospel,” Francine said. They ground their Catholic teaching on the foundation of the Theology of the Body and particularly emphasize marriage’s sacramental nature in the Catholic faith.

“We want to help couples have really strong, loving relationships,” Francine said in a 2020 interview on EWTN’s The Church Universal series. “To release the sacramental charism of the Holy Spirit to fulfill the mission to love each other more deeply. God calls us to a great ambition in our marriages. But he gives us the graces to help us achieve it.

“Most Catholic married couples think their marriage is a private affair between the two of them. When the married couple is good together, in love together, they become more generous to those around them,” Byron explained. “The vow I took on my wedding day means that my primary objective in life is my vocation to marriage. My work, everything else I do, is to support that.

“The vow I took basically calls me to love Francine as best as humanly possible, as incomplete as that will be, such as when she dies and meets God, her closest human experience, lived experience of God’s unconditional love will be my love for her. That’s my mission and that’s my vocation. You can’t do that by yourself. You need God’s intervention to do that.

“Growing in holiness is not just for our personal happiness. We like to say to couples, marriage isn’t supposed to make you happy. Not in the Catholic understanding. Marriage is supposed to perfect us in love and in holiness so we can enjoy eternity with God.”

Their commitment has led the Pirolas to serve in Catholic lay leadership roles at the parish, diocesan and national levels for more than three decades. Francine creates content for the Parish and Marriage Resource Centre (PMRC) Australia and serves on the Senate of Australian Catholic University.  Byron pursues an active full-time career in business – serving as managing partner of Sydney based strategic consulting firm, EY Port Jackson Partners among other interests. 

They are former Chairs of the Australian Catholic Marriage and Family Council, an advisory council of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference. Francine is also a former member of the Executive of the Catholic Society for Marriage Education. They are former past Presidents of the Australian Council of Natural Family Planning and have represented the Australian Catholic Bishops at meetings of the Pontifical Council of the Family. They are members of the Executive of PMRC for which Francine has been author and developer of programs and products. Byron also was a founding leader in the Antioch Youth Movement in Australia.

“Marriage is under-resourced in the Church, yet every dollar spent on marriage is multiplied,” Francine said. “When we look at the next generation, we see a decline in the faith of the children when families break down. We see the children lose confidence in the permanence of love. For a child developing their understanding of the world, when families break up, it has a devastating effect on their belief that love can be trusted to be permanent. If the closest living representation of God’s love in the family, the love between husband and wife, is not permanent, it is harder for the efforts of evangelism to take root in a culture, because the message the kids get is: love can’t be trusted.

“It’s really a breach of trust. Parents will say to their children, ‘Mommy and Daddy don’t love each other anymore, but we’ll always love you.’ The child wonders, ‘Can I really be sure you will love me?’ ‘When you say you will love me forever, can I really believe that?’ We are really starting now to see the impact when the marital relationship breaks down.”

One of the Pirolas’ early projects was to create parish kits to elevate Father’s Day. They also helped develop the SmartLoving weekend marriage enrichment program (formerly Celebrate Love) that they introduced to Australia, subsequently impacting thousands.

They began tailoring the program for Australians, incorporating marriage preparation, fertility programs, and outreach to those in troubled marriages whose spouses were not willing to attend. They note several differences from the American version of the program.

“Australians, similar to the British, are a little more reserved and private. The American version of the program incorporates small prayer groups, but we had a sense that for Australians it would be too intimidating to pray with strangers for your marriage, so we removed the need for formal sharing in groups,” Francine said.

Instead, they introduced a way to develop couples’ prayer in stages. First the team would pray for the couple, then they asked them to simply read a prayer together, and eventually to say spontaneous prayer with their spouse.

“In doing this, the weekend experience became applicable to more cultures,” she added. “Americans have great confidence — New Zealand, Britain, Asian countries — value privacy and reserve much higher than typical in American culture.”

A further consideration was the appeal to couples of mixed faiths as a prime evangelistic target. “We saw the group prayer as limiting the reach of the program. Once they changed the scope, the programs went more smoothly, and people were able to relax.”

Another cultural charism is lavish hospitality. The SmartLoving model puts much effort into creating a welcoming space that includes an abundance of quality food and beverages. “This was our gift to nurture the participants,” Francine said. “People often commented that they feel very loved and cared for.” Francine and Byron continue to speak regularly at marriage conferences, both in Australia and overseas.

People across the world struggle with the same issues, a point driven home when they took their marriage weekend experience to a church in Uganda. One of the segments addresses affirmation, acceptance and body image. Whereas those in the Western world struggle to lose weight, in Uganda, being thin is stigmatized as a sign of poverty.

“Whether plump or thin, people still feel the consequences in the relationship that they are not worthy because of what the culture tells them,” Francine said.

In 2003 they launched LivingWell Media to accommodate the growing publishing activities of the PMRC, including high quality digital media products. They are authors and creators of the My Faith Diary series which is used by more than 100,000 Catholic school students and teachers. They have since handed this apostolate to a new owner to focus all their ministry efforts on marriage.

Early adopters of new technology, they started investing in online learning in 2010, which positioned them well for the pandemic restrictions. “Australia is a long way from most places, but with technology, we can launch a global ministry”, Francine said. 

The Pirolas are authors of the on-demand marriage preparation course SmartLoving Engaged which is used for Catholic marriage preparation in dioceses across several English-speaking countries. “Reaching almost 4000 couples a year, it is the most advanced offering in the world in this format,” Francine reported. Other resources for marriages include SmartLoving BreakThrough for spouses in troubled marriages, coaching, webinars, blog posts, ebooks and newsletters.

Francine characterizes their primary ministry is marriage formation. “We have become even more committed to it because of the cultural assault on sexuality. The social setting is even harder than in the 1990s, when the pop culture book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, supported the idea that women and men were different. The complementary nature of the sexes has become a real mainstay of our work – but it’s getting harder to proclaim that without being labeled misogynistic.”

She believes Australia is an epicenter of spiritual warfare, noting the strong secularist forces in the country. In contrast to America, which was founded by people fleeing religious persecution, “our roots are a little more secular.” They see the devastation in the community from the ideology that has taken root.

Consequently, Francine said it is harder and harder to hold the line on what the church teaches. One of the topics of the SmartLoving courses address sexual intimacy and identity based on teaching from the Theology of the Body. Using accessible language, their unique presentation opens up this rich teaching of Saint Pope John Paul II.

Feedback from SmartLoving Engaged graduates suggests the message is compelling. 85% of the couples say they are willing to abstain from sex until the wedding, and 94% are open to Fertility Awareness Methods.

“They want their wedding to be a beautiful, unique event and their wedding night to be something special,” she said. They also encourage the sacrament of confession and/or blessing (for non-Catholics) from a priest prior to the wedding. “Before you receive the sacrament of marriage, we want to recognize our need for God’s forgiveness and to restore relationship with each other,” she added.

The Catholic Church has weathered cultural obstacles for millennia. Committed, visionary leaders like the Pirolas will continue to pass its beliefs and values to the next generation, whether it’s a prayer in a school diary, a marriage weekend or a premarital program that opens the door.