Wedding with no Mass?

[maryjk]

Truthfully - you should just grow up and if you are not a person of faith - or a person of the Christian Catholic faith - then be honest - First with yourself followed immediately by being honest with your family, friends and fiancé … especially with your fiancé …

I have a feeling we have been here before. A thread where the bride/groom doesn’t want to tell their family that they are no longer believers.

I have the same advice to you that I did for Blue Eyed Lady’s groom.

Grow up. I don’t see how you can think you are ready for marriage when you can not tell your parents about how you feel, what you believe. I just don’t get it.

In answer to your question, yes you can have a Mass without Communion, I did. And, no, you cannot get married in the Catholic Church if neither of you are Catholic.

 

[mcgoose]

Grow up. I don’t see how you can think you are ready for marriage when you can not tell your parents about how you feel, what you believe. I just don’t get it.

Why is this the knee jerk reaction on CAF? What do those two words actually mean? *Grow up. * I *have *grown up. I make medical decisions that literally save people’s lives. I hold their hands when I have to tell them their breast cancer came back. I am active in my community. I can cook more complex things than toast. I pay taxes. I am engaged.

Yet this is all overlooked when I express a fear to be a disappointment. I *will *tell my family. I will say “Here are my feelings, here are my beliefs. As an agnostic, I neither pretend to know or deny the existence of God. Instead I choose just to be the best person I can be. I have chatted with Catholics both online and in person, and weighed my options for marriage inside or outside the Church. Before we go further, I’d like to know what you have to say about it.”

However, before I make this (admittedly dramatic) speech, I merely wanted to know if there were ways of “customizing” a Catholic wedding as it were. There is, apparently. The question has been answered. And I think I have a very mature plan for addressing my family.

Growing up doesn’t mean that you can’t be scared, nervous, and irrational from time to time. Growing up means that you address your problems and work toward a solution, apologizing for your mistakes along the way. Please stop patronizing; it isn’t becoming.

 

[maryjk]

Growing up doesn’t mean that you can’t be scared, nervous, and irrational from time to time. Growing up means that you address your problems and work toward a solution, apologizing for your mistakes along the way. Please stop patronizing; it isn’t becoming.

Growing up means being your own person, not being an extension of your parents. It means that even when you disappoint someone else, you still have to be honest.

Much like Blue Eyed Lady’s groom, you are in effect, lying to your parents. Or you at least want to lie to your family. (And yes, if you pretend to be Catholic so you can have a Catholic wedding, that is a lie.)

So, yes, you need to grow up. I am not saying that you aren’t living an adult life. But if you still become a little girl when you are talking to your parents, you aren’t a grown up.

 

[mcgoose]

Growing up means being your own person, not being an extension of your parents. It means that even when you disappoint someone else, you still have to be honest.

Much like Blue Eyed Lady’s groom, you are in effect, lying to your parents. Or you at least want to lie to your family. (And yes, if you pretend to be Catholic so you can have a Catholic wedding, that is a lie.)

So, yes, you need to grow up. I am not saying that you aren’t living an adult life. But if you still become a little girl when you are talking to your parents, you aren’t a grown up.

Please read my paragraph above where I specifically spell out what I will tell my family. No lies on my part. You’re picking and choosing what to read in my posts while overlooking my main point.

I’m not an “extension of my parents”, as you claim. In fact, getting an MD has inspired my mother to go back to school herself and get a Bachelor’s degree. My parents actually look to me for answers many times now.

But this topic is more than just your everyday conversation. This is a very sensitive subject, more so than any other conversation that I’ve had with my family. This is my “coming out”. This is the core of my family’s beliefs that I am about to deny. How can you not allow me a modicum of fear? How can you not understand that this is a scary discussion?

I will go through with my plans to spell out my agnosticism and allow my entire family the opportunity to voice their opinions. I simply had one question about Catholic weddings beforehand so that I could be better educated.

Hopefully you understand my position now.

 

[twoangels]

I would urge you to be honest with your family about where you are in your faith. One of my brothers lied to the family for a long time about the faith. It put a considerable amount of stress on him and caused a lot of miscommunication. He had started dating a girl and we gave advise like making sure he go to confession more frequently. His girlfriend never knew what to say to us. I think she was afraid of what we’d say before. But ultimately she was just this silent woman who would arrive at family functions and then 15 minutes later would take my brother in the corner and ask to leave. We saw him less and less and occassionally he’d accuse us of not welcoming his girlfriend enough. :ehh: To hid that they were living together, we were rarely invited over and he kept looking for ways to keep us from offering to drop things off at his apartment directly.

Once he became open with us, things improved.

 

[TheRealJuliane]

And, no, you cannot get married in the Catholic Church if neither of you are Catholic.

Actually, BOTH of them are Catholic. She has lapsed and he has gone through the sacraments but had no further catechizing. But yes, they are still both Catholic, whatever labels they are using at the moment.

 

[PatriceA]

Why is this the knee jerk reaction on CAF? What do those two words actually mean? *Grow up. * I *have *grown up. I make medical decisions that literally save people’s lives. I hold their hands when I have to tell them their breast cancer came back. I am active in my community. I can cook more complex things than toast. I pay taxes. I am engaged.

Yet this is all overlooked when I express a fear to be a disappointment. I *will *tell my family. I will say “Here are my feelings, here are my beliefs. As an agnostic, I neither pretend to know or deny the existence of God. Instead I choose just to be the best person I can be. I have chatted with Catholics both online and in person, and weighed my options for marriage inside or outside the Church. Before we go further, I’d like to know what you have to say about it.”

However, before I make this (admittedly dramatic) speech, I merely wanted to know if there were ways of “customizing” a Catholic wedding as it were. There is, apparently. The question has been answered. And I think I have a very mature plan for addressing my family.

Growing up doesn’t mean that you can’t be scared, nervous, and irrational from time to time. Growing up means that you address your problems and work toward a solution, apologizing for your mistakes along the way. Please stop patronizing; it isn’t becoming.

Actually I do not believe the question has been answered. You can’t “customize” a Catholic wedding ceremony when the two people getting married don’t believe in the teachings of the Catholic Church NOR the vows they make to each other during the wedding ceremony. You both have to vow to be “open to life”, your infertility does not negate that vow. Your fiance doesn’t want children, you can’t “customize” that vow to fit his beliefs no matter how much you want to please your family.

 

[BlueEyedLady]

I feel for you. But you really cannot, and should not, have your wedding in a Catholic church. Nothing in the Catholic faith is customizable, least of all weddings/baptisms/sacraments in general. You need to have an honest wedding. Both you and your fiance deserve that.

I do applaud you looking for more information, and I’m sorry that some of the responses have bordered on mean. I think the issue here is that a lot of people take questions like this to heart because they imagine their own children leaving the faith.

If you want to bounce ideas around or just talk to someone feel free to PM me.

 

[maryjk]

Actually, BOTH of them are Catholic. She has lapsed and he has gone through the sacraments but had no further catechizing. But yes, they are still both Catholic, whatever labels they are using at the moment.

And unless they are willing to claim the Catholic faith, they will not be able to be married in the Catholic church regardless of what their parents may want.

It is always very interesting how people justify not telling their parents their beliefs. I never understand it, but I always find it interesting.

(And before anyone thinks I should walk a mile in their shoes, I have. I am married to an atheist. I was away from the Church when we met and married. I had to inform my parents that we weren’t getting married in a church but by a judge. We also had to tell his parents.)

 

[familyof4]

Congratulations on your engagement!

My only comments? Consider eloping. Go to Paris and get married in the City of Lights. Maybe Jamaica and get married on the beach at sunset.

I wouldn’t recommend getting married in the church at this juncture of your life. You wouldn’t be able to go through precana and believe that you are entering into a sacramental union. Regardless of whether or not you had a full mass, marriage is one of the seven sacraments in the Church-- and you don’t believe in the Church any more. Even though you physically can’t have children, you may or may not decide to adopt, and you would have made a promise before hand to raise any issue as Catholic… something you probably don’t want to do at this point.

Rather than discuss your religious views, go. Get married. Come back and throw a big party for all your family to share in your happiness. If some day, you decide to come back to the Catholic Church, you may be able to have your marriage convalidated. Sixteen years ago, I was a lapsed Catholic who married an unbaptized man. Today we teach RCIA. You never know where the journey will take you.

 

[TarkanAttila]

This isn’t a thread about how I came to be a non-Catholic. This is a thread about disappointing my family.

For the record, I have no “beliefs”. I am, for lack of a better term, Apathetic Agnostic. I think that if a god were all loving, it wouldn’t care if I went to a service every week and saved myself for marriage. If a god did care and was vengeful and sent people to hell for it, that’s not the kind of god I want to worship.

And there you have it. Everything I “believe”.

Oh. I can just tell I’m shooting myself in the foot, but here goes.

Do you understand what it means to be “all-loving”? Do you understand what it means to be loving? It means you want to spend time with someone. Come to know her better. Support her when she’s down. Do everything within your power and within her permission to help her.

When we say “God loves us”, and that we ought to love God, that is what we mean. He wants to spend more time with us. Yes, He is, in a sense, everywhere. But you don’t notice Him so well as you do when He takes flesh in the Eucharist. We really do need to spend time with him in Church if we wish to return the love He gives for us.

I mean, your BF. You say he loves you? You must spend many hours - waking hours - together. Just living life. At very least, every minute you spend with him, talking to him, just being with him, is precious to you both. Yes?

It’s like that with God. God wants to be with you, too. But the Good Lord’s a gentleman. If you don’t want Him to be with you, He backs off. He doesn’t force His way into your heart. He wants to help you to be happy. He wants to free you from the terrors and horrible things within the darkest parts of your mind. But you’ve got to want Him. Like your boyfriend, to love God, you must spend time with Him.

He’s held His hand out to you. As your boyfriend has been holding his hand out to your with the phone calls and dating you for these eight years. But you’ve got to grab God’s hand back, so to speak. He wants you to be saved. But He made it so as you could play a part in the adventure towards your salvation, too.

After all: love is something of a chase.