Family Retreat

The food is good and the accommodations are luxurious at the Arrowhead Springs Hotel in Southern California's San Bernardino foothills, but the 55 couples in the dining room said not a word. For meal after meal-at breakfast, lunch and dinner-they ate in silence. Then, at lunch on the third day, the room was suddenly filled with a din of voices. The silence of the retreat was over.

It was the fourth retreat for married couples sponsored by the California chapter of the Holy Family Retreat Association (founded three years ago in Phoenix, Ariz.). The idea is snowballing among Roman Catholic dioceses. In St. Paul,

Minn., some 10,000 couples have registered ; every parish in the city will have a one-day family retreat this fall. Last week, the Arrowhead Springs retreat barely over, reservations were pouring in for a new one next month in Santa Monica.

Miniature Church. It was only 18 years ago that the Rev. Edgar Schmiedeler of Washington, D.C., a Benedictine priest, transplanted the custom from Europe. Father Schmiedeler, 61, director of the Family Life Bureau for the National Catholic Welfare Conference, saw in the man & wife retreat a promising way to foster the concept of the family as a church in miniature. At Arrowhead Springs he was on hand to conduct the retreat in person. Participants spent three days together in spiritual lectures and devotional services. During the intervals, they meditated or read books selected for their attention to family problems. Sample titles: Sins of Parents, Your Family Circle, Saints and Marriages.

Newlyweds and oldsters approaching their golden-wedding anniversaries, bankers, soldiers, industrialists, doctors and union organizers listened again and again to Father Schmiedeler's even flow of words, reminding them of the spiritual meanings of their marriages. "Christian marriage," he said, "is a grace-giving institution and a sacrament of the Church in the same sense that the priesthood is a sacrament . . . Marriage is a symbol of the union of Christ with his followers, and the Christian family is a replica of Christ and the Church . . . The family which loves God, which serves God, which is in eternal union with God, will become what St. John described as the ecclesiola-a church in miniature."

The Results. In one session he answered questions that had been handed in. Samples:

Q. How can we keep our children . . . from growing away from us?

A. Children should grow away from their families in order that they may establish families of their own.

Q. If a woman dresses attractively in order to please her husband and thereby attracts the unwelcome attention of other men, is she guilty of a sin?

A. (after a roar of laughter from his listeners): Any woman should distinguish between attractive and indecent dress. If she dresses attractively only, I hardly think she need worry about sin.

At the final service, husbands and wives joined hands and solemnly reaffirmed their marriage vows. When the silence was over, and the couples who had been neighbors for days could speak to each other at last, there was little doubt that the three-day regimen had helped to change some lives. Said a young M.D.: "We came here with a number of problems. It was quite a shock to discover that we had a number of others that hadn't even occurred to us. But we've resolved all of them."

A middle-aged Los Angeles businessman admitted that he had been "A grump for years" and long resisted his wife's urging to make one of the retreats with her. But "when I finally agreed, it was amazing! I felt better almost immediately-long before we actually came up here." Said a rangy, baby-faced bridegroom to his bride: "Honey, I think we'll be going on quite a few of these."

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