I recently attended my first ever “full blown” Catholic wedding. The only other Catholic wedding service I ever attended was very short: the groom and bride were both around 60, both widowed with grown kids and grandchildren, and both had mobility problems (the groom was somewhat more than pleasantly plump and the bride had leg problems) so kneeling for extended periods of time was an actual issue, thus the entire service only lasted a few minutes and everybody told me “that’s the shortest Catholic wedding you’ll ever go to”. This time the bride and groom were both healthy 30-somethings, first wedding for both, and the service lasted about an hour.
I mean no disrespect to Catholics when I say that for people raised Protestant (and for that matter non-Episcopalian/non-Anglican- i.e. no kneeling benches to be found) being in a Catholic service is being a stranger in a strange land. My entire pew was filled by me and my friends, all of us of some Protestant background or other, and the “Sit/Stand/Kneel/Stand/Sit/Genuflect/Fight Fight Fight/Commune/Kneel” was confusing, something that in spite of being reasonably well traveled and well read people we’ve really only seen done on TV and in movies (where All Christianity is Catholic). (The bride was a sister of one of our closest friends, and her family is also Protestant [the bride converted], but her family members in the wedding had been to rehearsal and knew the procedure.)
So, one of the things that was a bit odd to us was the full communion (not a Protestant custom at weddings). I knew that I was not supposed to take Communion (in fact some members of the wedding party didn’t partake for various reasons) and that even if allowed to (and I seriously doubt anybody would have tackled me if I’d gone forward) it was alright to abstain, so no problem there. Certainly the standing and sitting were self explanatory and we followed suit, and even the non-believers among us have no problem respectfully bowing our head in silence during prayer.
For similar reasons I don’t cross myself or genuflect since
1- I’m not a Christian
2- I was raised Protestant
3- To me, it would be disrespectful if I did cross myself since there’s no internal conviction there
so this seemed okay.
However, just for future reference for the next time it comes up, here’s my question (which is asked in the title of course)-
Should we kneel? We did the first time, but after that we did not- we remained seated, partly because we weren’t really sure when to do so. But then in our neurotic way became a bit obsessed over “was this rude?” afterwards.
Is not kneeling disrespectful? (Luckily we were the extreme minority in the church and I think everybody knew “they’re Protestants from Alabama” so they didn’t take it offensively, but in general.) As mentioned, the main reason we didn’t was we weren’t always sure when to do so and we did not know the responses and thought that perhaps, like taking Communion or crossing ourself, it’s a “for members only” thing, but we were wondering should we have knelt and done the ‘silent moment of prayer’ thing just for uniformity.
Any other pointers on “Catholicism for Protestant visitors” also appreciated. (It’s always interesting to me when I stumble on something that’s always there and practiced by millions of mainstream Americans but I suddently realize how clueless I am on the matter.)