About to blow a gasket. Priest gave away our ceremony time.

Maura,

 

So sorry to hear this. I know how irratating all this can be. Our priest neglected to inform us that his Church was under construction and we had to change Churches and pay and extra fee to do this literally 2 days before the ceremony..ugh! What is with these priests in Mexico.. come on!

 

As silly as it may be I would go with your FMIL and let her try to provide "Extra Compensation" to get your slot back. I'm sure if you reason with the priest and offer this as a "Gift" for the churches cough cough "trouble" he will be receptive. Its your day and you worked hard to make it what you want... so a little extra money may not seem that bad in the long run to have a stress free wedding.

 

Good Luck and let us know what happens!

Monika : )

That totally reminds me of a discussion with my now SIL before our wedding. She is Catholic, and was absolutely freaking out because we were getting married in Mexico, on the beach, not in the church and that our wedding would not be "blessed". I just laughed and told her that last time I checked, God lives in Mexico too... rofl

Anyway Maura- I do realize how important it is in the Catholic faith to have a church ceremony, so I hope this gets worked out. I'm glad you have your home priest- he sounds like an awesome guy. I also like the idea of the morning ceremony with just family. I think that would be really personal and meaningful.

Keep us posted, in the meantime, deep breaths. It will all work out somehow.

i totally agree with this bridget, not all our friends are catholics so sitting through a full wedding mass would be difficult to begin with, which is why we dont want to take the 4 or 4:30 pm time because its going to be horrifically hot with no AC in the church at that time of day. i bought a second dress which is tea length, for our legal ceremony here, so i think i will wear that to the church in the morning if we can do that. then for the "vow renewal" in front of all our guests -- because we dont want the guests to know we've already done the ceremony in the morning -- i will wear my wedding gown to this ceremony.

Thanks Jamy we're well underway with our meetings with our local priest and our pre-cana is scheduled for march 1. I just never imagined all the church stuff would be such a PITA! I dont have many catholic girlfriends who are married so i have limited resources to ask questions to other people who've gone through the process. so glad to know there are girls on here who i can talk to this about!

monika, that is so obnoxious about your priest. but judging from the slideshow photos i saw of your wedding, the new church was gorgeous. although i am sure it was a HUGE pain to switch everything over to the new one. i think i would prefer to have her not try to get our slot back. i dont want to give that church any more money than is absolutely necessary because i am so ticked about what happened. jose doesnt want to get the time back either because he agrees doing the morning ceremony with our parents at the church would be nice, and that way we can keep all the guests in one place at the westin and have them go right from the ceremony to the reception with no hassle of transportation.

i think it is so ridiculous that the church doesnt allow it given all your points about how god is everywhere. jose tells me that a huge part of it is because during the wedding mass, they still do collection, so the church would potentially be missing out on a lot of money if you dont have your ceremony in the sanctuary and that is partially where the rule comes from. i really like the idea of the private ceremony with our parents too. only thing is that now i have to figure out how we're going to get photos of that... if i am going to have to cough up another $350 for our photographer to show up there in the morning too. i think doing it privately in the morning will also take a lot of pressure off of the ceremony in front of our guests.

Transportation wouldve been around $1300... but the thing is that my FMIL would have paid for the transportation. Since I am personally paying for my photographer out of pocket because FMIL thought it was too expensive, I'd be responsible for coming up with the extra money for the photog.

ok, don't kill me for suggesting this, but perhaps you could just ask a family member to be on photo duty for it?

There's not a whole lot of action to the ceremony and it's probably not worth the cost of getting a photographer. We had a guest do pictures of our Catholic ceremony, and, aside from our group shot at the end with the priest, there wasn't much to take pictures of.

Not at all to take away from how much it will mean to everyone there, it's just not a very photo-friendly type of thing.

Maura, I just saw this and I'm so sorry! I can't believe the stress this must be causing you. I really like the idea of just you two and your parents having the catholic ceremony in the morning. Altho we are having our Big Fake wedding at home for all to see, Doug and I and our parents will be doing our Small Real legal ceremony in Hawaii, and we wanted it to be intimate. Altho we wanted to have all the aspects of a DW, we still wanted to keep the "real" one private so it would be more meaningful to us, and then have our big "fake" wedding at home to insure all 175 or so of our guests will be able to join us to see us "get married."

 

Please keep us updated on what you guys decide on doing and feel free to vent away to us, in order to keep the peace at home!

Wow, I just saw this too. I am so sorry you are going through this. It sounds like you have at least one priest in your corner, so that is good.

 

I hope it all gets resolved quickly!

i would tend to agree with you bridge that its not photo friendly at all really, but being that the religious part is pretty important (mostly to my FI's family... my family could not care less if we have a catholic ceremony), i think i would ask my best friend who is married and knows the shots to take if she would photograph it. i will talk to fr. jack and see if he can make the morning part just a straight american wedding mass, and then the one we do in the evening with the guests can be our full out mexican traditional stuff like the madrinas with our arras, lasso, ramo and anillos... and maybe i can get my brother to videotape both ceremonies...