Catholic weddings on Fridays

Friday night weddings can be a challenge, with out-of-town guests scrambling to arrive on time and work-weary revelers bringing a less-than-energetic vibe to the ceremony. But if you are Catholic and want to have a nighttime wedding in Baton Rouge, on Friday it’ll be.

Otherwise, you can travel down the road to St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, for instance, another church in the Crescent City or somewhere else in Baton Rouge’s outlying areas. A lot of brides do. And with them, loads of bridal business trickles downstream and away from our city, along with the waters of the Mighty Mississippi.

The rumored reason is because there simply aren’t enough priests in Baton Rouge to celebrate afternoon masses on Saturday and masses on Sunday, plus weddings. Another theory: priests need Saturday nights off—to pray for the Tigers, perhaps? That’s blatant conjecture.

The real reason, courtesy of Father Than Vu, Vicar General of the Diocese of Baton Rouge, has more to do with keeping Sunday sacred than keeping priests from performing ceremonies on Saturday nights.

“On Saturday, the anticipated mass is celebrated at around four o’clock,” he says. Weddings and other ceremonies are put on hold “in order to preserve the integrity of the Sunday celebration, once it starts.”

On a church-by-church basis, some New Orleans parishes will allow couples to get married on a Saturday night, making for a much better second line down Bourbon Street, not to mention the appreciation of Catholic guests who get their Sunday obligations out of the way at the wedding. But not all New Orleans churches allow weddings on Saturdays, either. Much of the decision depends on how many priests work in the parish and the Saturday mass schedule.

By the way, Catholic churches don’t do funerals on Saturday nights, either.