Moving a Wedding Mass to Another State After Marriage Prep is Completed in Another

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The_Other_Me

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Just to preface; my fiance and I are not at this point yet. I just want to gather information as we’re working through our situation.

My fiance is active duty military and lives out of state while I currently live in Florida. We got engaged in late 2019 before all the COVID-19 mess happened and planned a wedding in FL at my home parish here. We completed our marriage prep at my home parish in March and were supposed to have been married a couple of weeks ago. Long story short, our wedding has been postponed twice now because of the travel restrictions that have been imposed on active duty military. My fiance is in the process of moving to a new duty station in Virginia and he is working on getting approval to go on leave in August to come to FL to get married and move me up to Virginia. However, we’re facing the very real possibility that his leave will be denied and he will not be allowed to travel to FL for an indefinite amount of time. If this happens, we will have to cancel the wedding we had planned here and plan to get married in Virginia instead.

My question is, how difficult is it to move a wedding mass to a different state when you’ve already completed marriage prep in another state? My main concern is the fact that my fiance and I are not currently residing in Virginia (and we do not have Catholic families there that would be registered at a parish) and are not members of any parishes there yet. (Though, I used to live in the area we’ll be moving to and was registered at a parish there for a year.)

Again, we’re not quite at this point but it’s a possibility we’ll have to do this and my biggest stressor right now is trying to move our wedding mass to another diocese without having to do the marriage prep process all over again. We want nothing more than to be married sacramentally in the Church and don’t want to delay starting our marriage any later than is necessary.
 
Has you fiance discussed this with a Chaplain from the military?
That might be the best place to start.
Prayers for you both.
 
The_Other_Me said:
how difficult is it to move a wedding mass to a different state when you’ve already completed marriage prep in another state?
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It should not be difficult. Your pastor talks to the other pastor, and that’s it. Get the Catholic chaplain at the new duty station involved, he can help.
 
No not yet but we probably will if this is the path we have to take. Thank you for the prayers!
 
As @1ke said, this should not be difficult. In my parish, we have often prepared a couple for a wedding that ultimately took place somewhere else (even in another country), and vice-versa.
 
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The_Other_Me said:
My question is, how difficult is it to move a wedding mass to a different state when you’ve already completed marriage prep in another state? My main concern is the fact that my fiance and I are not currently residing in Virginia (and we do not have Catholic families there that would be registered at a parish) and are not members of any parishes there yet. (Though, I used to live in the area we’ll be moving to and was registered at a parish there for a year.)
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Happens all the time although usually the couple always planned to have the wedding in a different place to where they did their prep. I’ve dealt with two weddings in the last 12 months which involved this situation (one incoming one outgoing).

You’ll need to find a priest in the place where you want to get married who’s willing to do the wedding, as @CilladeRoma points out, the military chaplaincy would be a good starting point. Then you complete the prep and paperwork where you are and your local priest sends all the paperwork through to the priest who’ll be doing the wedding (via the chancery offices at each end). He’ll know what to do so you don’t have to worry.

The other thing to remember is that local rules apply when it comes to timing, venues etc but this isn’t usually a problem unless you were planning on doing something out of the ordinary like getting married on a beach. Just run your plans past the priest who’ll be celebrating your wedding well in advance of the big day (and before doing anything like sending out engraved invitations) and all should be fine.
 
Agree with all the above that it should not be difficult… We come across it frequently in RCIA with the large military presence in our area.
 
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