| Church wedding | "profound mystery" | divine action | civil ceremony |
Christian marriage shall reflect the love and trust of Christ for His Church. He loves His Church despite all her faults and imperfections, and He does not leave her. The prototype of this link between Christ and His Church is already shown in the love of God for His people, Israel, in the Old Testament. He faithfully accompanied them through all times. This "covenant of God with His people" is mentioned repeatedly in the Bible in terms of the image of a marriage. (Isaiah 50,1; Jeremiah 2,2; 5,7).
The unconditional faithfulness of God and Jesus Christ to humanity and the Church should be mirrored in the love of the spouses. This love can correspond so closely to Christ's relationship with the Church that it is not only an image of His love, but that His love itself is becoming present through the love of the married couple. For this reason, Paul calls matrimony a "profound mystery". What happens between two people on a minor scale takes place between Christ and the Church on a large scale. Thus, God can be experienced in the love of the spouses. Therefore, the Christian marriage is a Sacrament, a sign, a place and means for divine action. It is not merely a community for the purposes of financial convenience or an institutionalized form of procreation and child raising.
A church wedding is more than just an extra blessing compared to a civil ceremony. A man and a woman commit themselves to each other before a priest or deacon and at least two witnesses, but usually a larger community, and thereby administer to each other the Sacrament of Matrimony. The validity of a marriage of Catholics is tied to this rite of the Church, which, like every other Sacrament, has its own distinct form. The community participates in this celebration and learns that God becomes present in a special way in the Sacrament of Matrimony not only to the spouses, but also to the members of the community. However, the Sacrament is not limited to the Church wedding but is very closely connected to the couple's history, beginning long before the wedding and ending with their death.
Although marriage, especially the Christian marriage, is today being called into question, the majority of couples opt for a Church wedding. This does not seem to jibe with the generally suspected decrease of the Church's credibility and the distancing of people from the Church. For this reason we often hear that for many people the ceremony at the Church is just a solemn setting for the wedding. However, in many cases, this is not so. Most brides and bridegrooms, even those who seem little engaged in the Church, feel that marriage is an important point of their lives and that the success of their common plans does not depend solely on themselves.