This Saturday, I went to a coworkers’ wedding at a Catholic church. I was suprised to see the ceremony had only half the usual mass, totally omitting the eucharist and all its preliminaries. Also, the wedding was officiated by a deacon, not a priest. When I questioned my coworkers about this, some suggested that the groom wasn’t Catholic and therefore couldn’t have a full ceremony. Is this right? I thought that the only way you could be married in a Catholic church was if the bride and groom were both Catholic or agreed to raise their kids as Catholic, and that a full mass had to done.
I know that you don’t need a full mass. My brother’s wife was raised Lutheran, and they could have done the stand-alone marriage, although they wanted the full mass.
The Catholic Catechism says that
That “normally” implies to me that sometimes the marriage ceremony doesn’t take place within the Mass.
Another section allows deacons to officiate:
I had a Catholic wedding, and we were allowed to pick and choose what to include. Since there were lots of Proddies attending, we chose to omit the Communion in order not to put the worshippers/priest in an embarrassing position/soul cast into the fiery lake (respectively).
Marriage is regarded by the Catholic Church as one of the sacraments. There is no reason why a wedding service could not be a standalone service.
When both bride and groom are Catholic, and the majority of guests are expected to be Catholic, it’s customarily done as a Nuptial Mass, in which both the Sacraments of Holy Matrimony and Holy Eucharist are present. The cite Walloon gave from the Catholic Catechism explains the thinking behind this.
But obviously, anything that detracts from the focus on the union of the couple in marriage is going to be improper. So if either partner, or someone significant in the wedding party, is not entitled to receive communion, avoiding conducting a Nuptial Mass is a wise pastoral decision (plus of course the wishes of the couple are, within the rules of the church, paramount).
I know that the rules on “mixed marriages” have been relaxed substantially from “what everybody knows” about the non-Catholic spouse, but I’m not sure precisely what they are at present. I assume there are Dopers with quick reference to them who will provide the details.
Last I heard, which would have been about ten years ago, the non-Catholic partner had to agree to not interfere with the Catholic partner raising the children as Catholics. I have no idea how rigidly this is enforced, though.
As for the deason… well, nowadays, there’s such a huge shortage of priests in the Catholic Church that deacons now regularly do all kinds of things that would definitely have been done by priests only when I was a kid.
A deacon can’t consecrate bread and wine, which means he can’t say MAss. But nowadays, in many parishes, deacons are responsible for most of the baptisms and a lot of the weddings.
My wife and I are not Roman Catholic, but we’re Episcopalian/Anglican, where the Eucharist is commonly celebrated in conjunction with a wedding ceremony. However, even though you don’t have to be Episcopalian to take communion in the church (you just have to have been baptised), we figured enough of our Presbyterian and Baptist families would be uncomfortable enough that we decided to do without the Eucharist. We stuck some good Anglican hymns in there just to make 'em squirm, though.
May I inquire as to where the ceremony was held? Most major Diocese, or Archdiocese, I would suspect would take a much more traditional route, with full mass, kneeling, suffering and guilt thrown in.
The bride and groom do have to agree to raise their kids Catholic, but only one of them has to be Catholic.
They don’t have to have a full mass (though the Diocese of Pittsburgh, at least, won’t allow a priest to have a hard-and-fast rule against a Nuptial Mass for a Catholic-non-Catholic wedding). It’s not common for a mixed wedding to have a mass, because either the bride or the groom and presumably most if not all of their family wouldn’t be able to take communion, and that might be a little awkward. Two Catholics could get married without a mass, but AFAIK that’s not the way things are usually done.
i was married in a Catholic ceremony 18 years ago, in the diocese of Brooklyn. I had to promise to do “everything in my power” to raise my children Catholic, and my husband (non-Christian at the time) was informed that I had made that promise, but wasn’t required to promise anything himself.
I married a non-Catholic in the church, with the full mass. My ex didn’t actually have a religion at the time, though, and I had to make a “faith commitment.” None of my kids are Catholic today, so I guess I owe them an apology.
Location has nothing to do with it. As noted above, it is not at all uncommon for the marriage to be performed in the context of only the Liturgy of the Word when one spouse is not Catholic.
As to kneeling and suffering, my full Catholic wedding with Mass skipped the kneeling bit (one of the sillier decisions by the NCCB) and the (minimal) suffering only started, as with any marriage, after the honeymoon.
When a Catholic marries a non-Catholic, the choice of celebrating mass is a decision made between the couple and the parish and there are no rules that specify what must be done. (There are rules to cover various events once that choice has been made, but the church, at large, neither requires nor forbids the celebration of mass in conjunction with a wedding. If there is any diocese that has set up their own rules, they are acting on their own and not following church directives.)
Similarly, the rules regarding a marriage between a Catholic and a non-Catholic now boil down, pretty much, to a declaration by the Catholic of the intent to continue to practice the faith and to raise any children Catholic and a declaration by the non-Catholic to refrain from interfering with those actions.
In my sister’s wedding last year (he’s Catholic, she’s not), one of the vows had to do with being willing to have children. Is that a mandatory part of the wedding service in a Catholic church, or is that something that is included or not at the discretion of the officiant and the couple?
I thought the Mass was the Eucharist. If the Eucharist wasn’t celebrated, how could there be “half the usual mass”? 
(short of near ligh speeds and all them special relativistic concepts 
)
The first half of the Mass is the Liturgy of the Word, and the second half is the Liturgy of the Eucharist.
The term *Eucharist * tends to be used in a number of ways:
- it can refer to the mass as a whole e.g. the Sunday Eucharist at our parish;
- it can refer to a part of the mass, where the mass is divided up into the first instructional part with readings and homily (the Liturgy of the Word) and the second sacrifical part with the consecration of the Host and the distribution of communion (the Liturgy of the Eucharist);
- it can refer more narrowly to just the consecrated Host itself.
It is standard, as far as I have ever heard. Part of the promise of marriage is to accept all the children God sees fit to give you.
Being open to procreation is certainly part of church teaching, but I have never heard it included in the marriage vows. There are a couple of places in the prayers of the priest or deacon that mention marriage being established for the continuance of the human race, but there is no place in the official rite where the couple publicly pledges to breed. The point at which the Catholic promises to continue to practice their faith (which would include being open to procreation) and where the non-Catholic promises to not interfere with the Catholic’s promise generally occurs in a private meeting with the priest or deacon during the preparation for the sacrament. Certainly, a couple may choose to voice those promises at the service (or, I suppose, some cranky cleric might coerce them into making a public declaration), but that is not part of the “normal” Catholic celebration.
hmmmm
Prior to the exchange of vows, the presiding person does ask a number of questions to ensure that both the man and the woman are entering freely into the union. Looking around the internet, I now see that those questions sometimes include points on having children and rearing children. I am not sure whether that is local custom or not and I do not know whether the same questions are asked of mixed couples and Catholic couples. I do not recall being asked whether I was open to having kids, but that was 23 years ago and I could have forgotten some of the extra stuff.
At any rate, those questions, while part of the service, are not actually part of the vows. (My vows I remember.)