As many have said, a Catholic wedding shouldn’t take more than 45 minutes.
An Evangelical friend of mine got married. I’m not exactly sure how long the ceremony was, I’m sure it was way over an hour; I think that the other point to make it look even longer is that I had no idea what was going to happen.
Yet another reason to come to Vegas and let Elvis marry you in under 3 minutes.
What? A regular Mass is about an hour. A wedding has a normal Mass with extra stuff mixed in. How would it come in being shorter?
I’m a Catholic and most of the weddings I’ve been to have been Catholic weddings, so the longest was in the hour and a half range.
I had a full Mass and I think it was about an hour and 15 minutes. I don’t see any way I could have gotten it down to 45 minutes, even if we took out all the music!
Yeah, Hindu weddings are pretty long. I always feel for the bride and groom. The guests aren’t expected to sit there quietly or anything, we do our own thing and eat and mingle and sometimes stop to watch them. They need to be shortened still.
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I disagree. Receptions, with the ‘rubber chicken’ food and tedious speeches, are generally pretty dull affairs. The ceremonies though are much more memorable and enjoyable. It’s the important bit afterall, where the actual wedding takes place. I’ll often accept an invitation to the wedding and refuse
I’ll echo the surprise at this comment. A nuptial mass, with music **and **with the wedding ceremony thrown in, is extremely unlikely to be finished in under 45 minutes.
I stand corrected. 45 minutes is a quick regular Mass. 75 is more likely for a wedding.
Well, maybe it’s because I’ve only been to Catholic weddings, but the receptions are much more memorable for me. Maybe because every Catholic wedding is almost 100% identical to every other one. Hell, the bride and groom aren’t even allowed to say their own vows, they just have to say “I do/I will” to the pre-written ones.
Sure, maybe some of the songs are different, but often times even half of them are the same (like that fucking “there is love” wedding son.) And I don’t know if it’s required to be this way in a Catholic wedding, but you always, without fail, will have the EXACT SAME reading of the EXACT SAME letter from Paul to the Corinthians EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. And Catholic weddings are also about ten times more likely to use that God Damn Canon in D by Pachebel for the bridal procession.
The basics are the same, of course. That’s the point of ritual.
There is a wide choice of readings. I agree that that particular one from Corinthians is overdone, but couples choose it because they like it.
I’ve not heard that used as a processional at a Catholic wedding. Unless the bride were processing down the nave of a cathedral, I think it would be way too long.
The last two I’ve been to both ran around an hour, I think, but one was Vietnamese/Catholic and one was Jewish/Catholic, and both combined elements of both, but neither was properly a Mass.
Ditto- I will say that it was interesting and it took three clergy to do it! (I think one priest & a couple of deacons.)
Wait…so a Hindu wedding is basically a reception where all the guest are eating, having a good time, and the bride and groom have to be off to the side going through…what? A ritual of some sort? Listening to readings? And every once in a while you pay attention to what the bride and groom are doing? And the couple has to sit there smelling all the food, listening to everyone off laughing and having a good time, while they do…what?
Sorry if it’s cliche, but I actually had Paul’s letter to the Corinthians as one of the readings. I also had Pachelbel’s Canon in D as the processional (the church was huge, and so was my bridal party, so there was time for it.) Though it might seem overused to some, to my family it was quite the departure from custom, as every other wedding I’ve attended for a family member had the bridal chorus from “Lohengrin,” aka “Here Comes the Bride,” as the processional. To them, it’s just The Way We Do Things.
All the same, if I ever marry again, it’s going to be a hell of a lot simpler and certainly won’t be a Catholic ceremony (they only let you marry in the Church once, and never again unless you get an annulment or the other person dies, from what I understand.)
About an hour? Dear Og, in Spain a weekday Mass is under 30’ (the 7am at the Jesuits is 15’); the laws of physics don’t let a Sunday Mass run over one hour because that’s how far apart they are, whether there’s special Sacraments or not. Oh, and since my parish is the Capuchinos, they’re very kumbayah: a Mass without singing is almost unthinkable. There’s even singing in the weekday Masses.
If it’s going to run over 50’ you need to get the priest to officiate at unusual hours, and as most are already overclocking, good luck with that.
So the longest I’ve been to was: Sacrament of Marriage, about 5’; plus Mass, for a total of about 50’. The shortest was my aunt’s second wedding (civil), which lasted 10’.
Sorry, out of time:
As for the whole party thing, the longest I heard of was a friend’s sister (started with a cocktail at 4pm on Friday, there were activities on Saturday, the actual wedding on Saturday). The longest I’ve been to have been several “Standard Spanish” for which the ceremony took place in the morning: people do get to bed after breakfast whether the ceremony has been before or after lunch… (not everybody, you’re excused if you claim “old age” or “little children” and I’ve been claiming “old age” since I started finding drunks cumbersome).
I swear I am NEVER going to another Catholic wedding. Especially since it isn’t like a funeral usually in that everybody else is Catholic and knows what they’re doing. It’s embarrassing AND interminable.
ETA - of course, the traditional Southern wedding has events all weekend, but I don’t really consider that “longest wedding”. The service is as short as humanly possible so we can all get to the booze.
Went to a Catholic wedding with a mass, and it was about 90 minutes or so’s. VERY long when you have a wiggly toddler – luckily we were seated by the back door and able to slip out into the narthex with him to let him burn off some steam, then returned and he sat quietly for the rest of the service.
My second wedding took about 5 minutes – courthouse FTW!
I’ve been to about 200 wedding by now, and the longest I’ve run into was a Hindu ceremony, about two hours. The average Catholic full mass wedding is about an hour. Yesterday’s ran an hour and a half, which is the longest I’ve been to, although I really couldn’t tell you why it took that long. It seemed at the same pace as other weddings I’ve been to. (And, incidentally, it did not have the Corinthians “love is patient, love is kind” reading.) A Catholic wedding without mass usually runs around forty minutes.