Posted by:
PtLoma
(
)
Date: July 10, 2011 09:19PM
I attended a wedding yesterday. Groom comes from an active Catholic family, bride from agnostic family. They wanted the ceremony at the same venue as the reception (country club), which meant no Catholic ceremony. Normally, unless one is a VIP, Catholic wedding ceremonies take place in Catholic churches (sometimes in a non-Catholic church, if a Catholic priest is a co-officiant with a non-Catholic clergyperson). They used a pastor from a nearby nondenominational church. Neither of them attend that church, but I think sometimes these pastors do ceremonies knowing that it spreads good PR for their church.
Anyway, in spite of this not being traditional Christian liturgy, he still asked the couple to pledge their troth "until death us do part." This comes from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer from the late 1500s/early 1600s, and is still found in mainstream Christian wedding liturgy to this day.
I have heard Mormons seize on this phrase to emphasize that they alone have some sort of monopoly on "eternal marriage" and that other Christians acknowledge that the marriage lasts only until one member of the couple dies.
Bullshit! Most non-LDS Christians I know presume that their deceased grandparents or great-grandparents are together in heaven, if they believe in heaven, and no one expects that great-Grandma Alice is cavorting around upstairs with anyone other than her late husband.
What "as long as you both shall live" ande "til death us do part" to me means is that if one person dies, the survivor is free to marry again....unlike a divorced person, who traditionally (until churches liberalized) was not free to remarry. The couple pledging their troth "until death us do part" are promising to be loyal to and care for each other until the first one dies. At that point, the survivor is released from those fidelity vows and is free to remarry.
It does not mean (to me and to many others) that the original couple won't be reunited in heaven some time in the future. Since other churches never allowed polygamy, the phrase is needed in the liturgy to indicate that death releases the survivor from the vows of fidelity, with respect to being able to marry again. It has been twisted out of context to suit the missionary goals of Mormonism, but I don't think that many Mormons understand what it means in Catholic or mainline Protestant context.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/10/2011 09:19PM by PtLoma.