My Marriage and the Catholic Church
Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago is a pretty famous church to get married in, I didn't have those kind of connections.
It is not surprise that I grew up a Polish Catholic in Chicago. A large percentage of people here have that exact same demographic. I dreamed of getting married in a beautiful church like St. Mary of Częstochowa in Cicero where my dad’s family is from.
Our family went to Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church in Darien though. Very modern and minimalist. I got used to it over the years and when I got engaged last fall I was actually excited at the thought of getting married there since I grew up going to church there.
Along the way though, I seem to have become more of an atheist than I thought. Something about the lack of plausibility in everything about what was said all those years has made me respect the Catholic church but not really believe in it anymore. (surprisingly, my family has felt the same way despite all their Catholic upbringing and schooling too) My fiance is more agnostic and he believes in God although not restrictive, war inducing organized religions. None of this was a problem until we went to the “theology seminar” on Tuesday. (the first of 6 “classes” as a part of their required marriage prep program.
It really wasn’t a history/bible lesson about marriage in the sense of here are some road maps we think work well to follow. It was a degrading rant session by a Theology professor from Montini High School who proceeded to call us “fools” for breaking any of the “rules” of the catholic church. Why do they not understand that you will always attract more people with honey than ridicule?
What made this even more odd was that amidst telling us we would suffer eternal damnation for going things like taking birth control pills and using condoms he kept saying the word “like” in-between most words. So, he basically sounded like a 13 year old. (If you aren’t like going to confession weekly you’re like an idiot)
Truth be told, I don’t know if there is a “god” or not, (but there certainly is no afterlife) but I can’t prove it one way or another and I always thought I wanted to get married in a church. It makes me wonder why now? I accept that I was raised in a Judeo-Christian-Freemarket-Capitalist society and this has framed my views of what is good and bad, right and wrong and what feels like a meaningful wedding.
I feel like going to a judge or rent-a-reverend for my wedding in Chicago is meaningless and fake but I don’t want to be full-on Catholic either. It just feels wrong to be that mean. It feels incredibly discriminatory toward other people with different backgrounds (they said the other religions were the work of the devil) and it seems against freedom of everything American really. And it feels like they disrespect nature and science while at the same time disrespecting the intelligence of the college educated people there. There must be a way to have a more meaningful ceremony without being overbearing and discriminatory.
I also felt like the advice they gave in this “theology class” for making your marriage work amounted to: Read the bible and Pray together. WTF? That’s it? We are supposed to find the answers to our feelings and relationship from a 2,000 year old book translated from Latin and changed around multiple times to fit their marketing needs? That was rude and useless. I guess what I really liked about the Catholic church was the tradition, the singing, the community. People coming together to try and remember what is really important in our busy lives and get back to our morals. Plus my family had a history there since before they came to America around 1900. Not the “everyone who doesn’t follow us this exact way is evil or going to hell” stuff. The demeaning judgemental nature is not what America is about.
Basically all this means that I have to find somewhere else to get married. We are looking into some other churches and my Fiance’s family church. They are Presbyterian. I am ok with what their program sounds like. It says it is a 4 week course taught by a psychologist (not a deacon or priest) about how to communicate effectively and stay together amongst all the challenges you face. It sounds like real practical advice to me.
Please do not bother to comment if you are going to rant about how I am going to burn in hell for having my views. There is no point in criticising other people for their own personal decisions. I don’t pick on Catholics, I just choose to live my own life. Remember that is allowed in a Democracy.
Update: We have decided to get married at First Presbyterian Church in Wheaton instead. They have our date reserved, so things seem to be in the works there and hopefully will be better.
Update 2: The deacon called yesterday asking why we weren’t at the latest meeting session and wasn’t best pleased when I told him we wouldn’t be having our wedding there. What gets me is that as a last knife twist he decided to tell me that our FOCUS test (scantron) scores weren’t very good and it would have taken a lot of meetings with them in order to get married anyway. He had the gaul to say we didn’t know eachother as well as we thought we did. Hah! More undermining our confidence in our decisions in the catholic guilt way. I know what we answered may have been different, we discussed all the questions right after we took the test and found that the way they were worded was very confusing, and we had interpreted them to mean different things. When we discussed it we found we were ok on most things but obviously differ in reading comprehension skills.
Lengthy post, but I liked it. My wife and I believe that for one’s health, one can give up one’s wealth. For one’s religion, one can give up one’s wealth and health. But, for God, one can give up all three. We see God as the Source of Love. Anyway, there are many breathtaking settings for your wedding ceremony, and not the least of your considerations might be in a beautiful outdoor setting perhaps in a park, something with a whole lot of “Mother Nature,” perfect for celebrating your love and God the Creator.
It’s interesting - Carrie and I had a very different experience. She was raised Catholic and I am a non-practicing Jew. Since it was important to her to be married at Old St. Pat’s in Chicago, I was willing to consider it. Until I met Father John Cusick - then it was not something to consider, but a no-brainer. The man is one of the most spiritual people I have ever met, and I can’t imagine anyone else marrying us. His best friend is a rabbi, and he knows more about Judaism than I do. He’s also a big Cubs fan, and through a weird twist of fate, the season tickets I bought into last summer were actually the seats right in front of his.
At no time through the Catholic marriage process were we made to feel as if we were doing anything wrong - and that’s why I love Fr. Cusick. He is a straight-talking South Side priest, but at the end of the day, he knows that the message he is on this planet to promote is about love.
Half of the people at our wedding were Jewish. And through the whole ceremony (we did not have a Mass because that would have been pushing it for the Jews), at no time did I feel that this was all about my wife’s traditions. He was respectful of my family’s beliefs and traditions, my wife’s family’s beliefs and traditions, and at the end of the day, my favorite part of our entire wedding was the homily he gave - and Carrie agrees.
My point is simply this - it SUCKS that there are religious folks out there like the ones you mentioned, and I think it’s a terrible thing to make people feel badly in the name of religion. Yes, sometimes people need a little kick in the butt, and you can’t always use kid gloves, but I think that priests like the one you mentioned have completely missed the lessons of Jesus. And I’m not even a Christian, but I think I understand Jesus better than that dude apparently does.
Oh, and I forgot to mention - sometime I’ll have to tell you about the pre-cana we did. It was only one day, but at least the only message wasn’t “pray together a lot”. The couple who taught it were hysterical (not in an intentional way) and I’ll have to regale you with that story offline sometime.