Meet Fr. Mike Chime

I'll never forget the young woman sitting across from me, tears streaming down her face. "Father, I loved him. I really did. But I never knew what marriage actually meant." She was 28. They'd been married three years.

In eighteen years as a marriage judge, I've heard this same story hundreds of times. Good people. Pure intentions. But something went wrong long before the wedding day. Most couples who end up in my office are dealing with problems that started when they were children. They never learned what makes a marriage work. Nobody taught them how to choose the right person. And when hard times came, they had no tools to survive.

I became a priest in 1992 in Enugu, Nigeria. After years of studying church law in Rome, I returned home in 2006 to serve as a marriage judge. My job? To review broken marriages and determine what went wrong.

Case after case, I saw the same patterns. Couples who didn't understand what they were promising. Young people who felt pressured into marriage. Spouses who had never learned to communicate. It broke my heart because most of these problems could have been prevented.

Then 2020 came. COVID shut everything down. For the first time in years, I had time to think deeply about what I was seeing. That's when it hit me: we're trying to fix marriages after they break. But what if we could stop them from breaking in the first place?

The couples I meet aren't bad people. They're just unprepared. Some grew up in homes where faith wasn't lived out daily. Others never had anyone help them figure out if marriage was right for them. Many rushed from dating to engagement to wedding without asking the hard questions.

I see broken marriages every day. Now I want to prevent them. Catholic Marriage Life is different because we start early and stay with you. We don't just prepare you for a wedding. We prepare you for a lifetime.

My hope is simple. If you follow this path, you'll build a lasting marriage. You'll love each other well. You'll raise kids who know how to love. And you'll walk together toward heaven.

Why do I do this? Because Jesus said when we help others, we help Him. Every couple I serve is a chance to serve God.

I'm a priest. My life is about serving you. Everything here exists to help you build the marriage God dreams of for you: faithful, joyful, lasting forever. I'm walking this path with you. Join me. Let's build marriages that actually work.