When God Interrupted Our Wedding Plans

By Allie Marcum & Samuel Peterson

God’s call didn’t come in a way I expected or wanted, it came through a big argument with my brother.

My fiancée and I had been engaged for about a week and started to imagine details such as where the wedding would be, who would be there, what the dinner would be, the dress and the suit, etc. During this time, we were also trying to search for a new church as we learned more about theology and how to faithfully read the Bible, an activity some would call “church shopping”. In the middle of this happy and stressful time my brother dropped a ‘bombshell’ on us, something better to do sooner rather than later. He told me that he wouldn’t be able to come to our wedding because as a baby I was baptized Catholic which meant I was getting married outside of the church. Although I was baptized Catholic, I wasn’t brought up in the church, so I was uncertain of what it meant to be baptized in the Catholic church and how that made me different.

After this conversation with my brother, I had to let my fiancée know what was happening, unsure of how she would receive news like this. We both didn’t have much knowledge about Catholic theology and approached it with more skepticism than acceptance. After talking for several hours across several days and researching furiously, we came to understand some of the teachings about baptism and marriage. For baptism, because I was baptized as a Catholic, I would always be considered a Catholic and because of my circumstance I was not in full communion with the Catholic church. In regard to marriage, if I didn’t have my wedding in a Catholic church or without a dispensation, I would be going against one of the teachings of the Church.

At this point, there was still a piece of the puzzle missing, the why. Why does the Catholic church teach against getting married outside of the church? Why was my brother unwilling to attend my wedding, but my other brother was? We were not well equipped to answer these questions on our own so we were provided with the information for someone who could help, Dave Brunsman. For those unaware he leads OCIA, a process that both of my brothers had started already. He kindly gave us over an hour of his time on Sunday to discuss our situation. From this conversation we started to understand the why behind the theology to which we were introduced. Particularly, we learned about the importance of consciousness in making a decision and that if my brother had decided in his conscience that he would be sinning by attending our wedding, then he has a higher duty to God than he does to his family.

After this point, we had a new decision to make as a couple and much more to discuss. Would it be possible to have a Catholic wedding? Did we want to become Catholic? Thankfully, St. Max offers a meeting time to help with discerning the specific question of becoming Catholic with inquiry sessions. My fiancée started going to these inquiry sessions. I could see God working in her and how excited she was to learn everything she could about Catholicism and the Catholic Church. Very shortly after we joined the OCIA sessions and started marriage prep through St. Max. We became Catholic this past year and are to receive the sacrament of marriage in less than two months!