Why Joseph and I Skipped a Popular Catholic Tradition at Our Wedding
If you’re planning your own wedding, or have been to a wedding of a Catholic family member or friend recently, you’ll realize that Catholic weddings are different.
We don’t get married outside on a mountaintop.
You won’t find Catholic nuptials at the beach.
And we don’t walk down the aisle to country music. Weddings within a Mass can last upward of an hour, and the vows that we say are already written for us — and that’s just to name a few things.
But what you may also not know (and I didn’t know this when my now-husband and I were planning our wedding a year ago), is that the Catholic Church revised the official marriage rite not too long ago. Those revisions changed the way we planned our wedding. Since we got married right after the revisions were put into place, we were able to sit down with a priest and go over the changes in the liturgy.
Planning your wedding is a beautiful process, and when you get to the wedding Mass, you’ll find out that you get to make a lot of choices when it comes to the liturgy, from the entrance to the exit. One part of our wedding that Joseph and I spent a lot of time thinking about was how we would get to the altar during the entrance procession.
Most people think of this part of the wedding in a traditional way: the bride, preceded by the wedding party, is escorted by her father to the altar where she meets her groom. But I was surprised to see that the Catholic Rite of Marriage didn’t even mention this form.
Click here to find out how Joseph and I walked down the aisle instead!
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