“We had planned to be married on May 2nd at St. John Vianney Catholic Church in Fishers, which is in the Diocese of Lafayette.  I grew up on the northeast side of Indianapolis and my parents are members of that parish now, and Jules and I had wanted to be married near my childhood home. When the virus situation worsened in the U.S., the bishop of the Diocese of Lafayette indefinitely suspended all public masses and liturgical services in late March, and the CDC mandated social distancing guidelines, and so we painfully cancelled our May 2nd wedding plans.  I have been living in Lansing, Michigan, for the past few years and Jules is from Toronto, Ontario, and planned to move to Michigan in early April.  When we found out that the U.S./Canadian border was to be closed because of the pandemic, Jules moved up the date of his move ASAP and safely got over the border on March 16th just four days before the border was closed.  We knew this was a grace from God.  Because restrictions continued to tighten almost daily and at the time there was no option to be married at my parents’ parish anytime in the near future, we prayed about what to do.  Several days later, we received an email from the Diocese of Lansing with information that the Bishop here was still permitting weddings within the Diocese with only 10 or fewer people.  Jules and I realized we wanted to be facing this pandemic as husband and wife, and after speaking to our priest friend in Quebec City who performed our marriage preparation and to our families telling them what we felt called to do, we reached out to our pastor at our parish in Lansing, Church of the Resurrection, and asked him if he could marry us.  Without hesitation, he agreed and offered to marry us at the Easter Vigil, since all other sacraments had to be postponed that evening because of the limited number of people allowed.  We spoke to all our immediate family and told them what we truly felt was a calling, to be married at the Easter Vigil Mass at our parish, and that we couldn’t say no, even though it meant getting married without any of our family physically present.  The pastor at St. John Vianney in Fishers graciously sent our canonical paperwork directly to our parish in Lansing, and we were set.
We had to do one more thing before the wedding.  Through another gift of God, we were able to get our marriage license here in our county in Lansing by an emergency appointment after we explained our situation to the clerk’s office!  The office has been closed to the public for a long time, but they are still processing some forms on a very limited basis because of their reduced staff, and thus they needed to make an ’emergency appointment’ with us to give us our license in person.
For the wedding on April 11th, there were only 9 people in the main church, and 6 in the choir loft (which our pastor considers a separate room, and the musicians were all spaced apart from each other).  Two of our dear friends here in Lansing stood in as our witnesses.  It was surreal to be sitting inside our parish church when so many other Catholics around the world had to celebrate Easter from their homes, something we didn’t take lightly as we prayed for all our family, friends, and others during the Mass.  On the plus side, the entire liturgy was live-streamed so all our family and friends were able to watch!
It was a miracle that we could be married during a state-wide shut down and we are still reeling from this gift from God.  We are sad that we couldn’t celebrate our wedding on May 2nd in Indianapolis as we had planned, but we are so grateful that we could be married by our parish priest in Michigan.  Michigan and Indiana will still be on state-wide lockdowns on May 2nd, with the Canadian border closed until late May, so we are glad that we went ahead with getting married here while we were given the opportunity.  God has been so good to us.We believe our meeting each other (on a three-day, 70-mile pilgrimage in France from Notre Dame-de-Paris to Notre Dame-de-Chartres during Pentecost of 2018) and our wedding were both totally divinely planned and thus we are giving all the credit of our vocation to Our Lord and Our Lady.  It’s been a calling to us to share these stories with anyone who wants to hear, so that people may know that God really is the Author of our lives here on earth.” – Mary (Luisi) Lapprand