Outrageous "parish wedding fee"

[Sarabande]

The vast majority of weddings that I have attended were wedding ceremonies, not nuptial Masses.

I’m musician at a lot of Catholic weddings over the past 5 years and I can honestly say that I’ve only done a handful which were ceremonies and that was because they were mixed marriages. One was with a Catholic couple, but theu had to be married by the deacon because the parish had only one priest and he had to be somewhere else. The majority of Catholic couples, at least in my experience, choose to have the nuptial Mass. So, it’s really strange for me when I find out that a Catholic couple wants a ceremony. Nothing wrong with it, but just out of the ordinary in my area.