Why can’t I have my wedding ceremony outdoors with a Catholic priest?

With another wedding season upon us, many churches have had their wedding schedules long booked. Couples have spent months preparing both for their wedding and their lifelong marriage and may now be in the last days before their union. It can be an exciting and a stressful time as their efforts to make the day special come together.

Every parish priest is aware, though, that their wedding logs are much less populated than those of a generation ago. Statistics about Catholic weddings and weddings in general in the United States have plummeted. The rate of people getting married is only about 60% of what it was 30 years ago, and those who do get married often wed years later than then. Couple that with the changing attitudes toward faith in general and the onslaught of wedding photos on a beach or a backyard or a forest or wherever, and many no longer understand the connection between church and marriage at all. In the end, fewer couples approach their parishes for their wedding if they wed at all, shirking their concern for having a valid and sacramental marriage.

In the face of these downward trends, why does the Catholic Church hold to its expectation that couples celebrate their wedding within an actual church? To put it simply, the Church’s vision and the culture’s vision of marriage are not the same. The Church sees marriage as a partnership for the whole of life that flows from a husband and wife’s nature as the potential parents of new people, formed in God’s image.

The husband and wife commit everything about themselves to each other to fulfill their purpose in life and create a place for a family to flourish. From their vows onward, they must learn to think no longer in terms of “I” but in terms of “we.”

We have no need for more examples of celebrity and non-celebrity marriages splitting because the one or both spouses felt like “finding themselves” down a new path. The Catholic Church, taught by Jesus Christ, recognizes that marriage is a sacrament. Two baptized people pledge themselves in a lifelong partnership in Christ. In that setting, their relationship can become a picture of Christ’s love for his people, the church (see Eph. 5:32). Christ’s love is full and faithful. He does not take it back or grow bored with it. Nor does he take it back even if we are unfaithful on our end.

Since a wedding, in the eyes of our faith, is a religious event, disciples of Christ are called to celebrate it in a religious way. Ideally, a bride and groom would celebrate their marriage during a Mass, the liturgy where Christ gives his body to his bride. Sometimes a Catholic wedding will not be part of a Mass. This is most common when a Catholic is marrying a non-Catholic. Even in that case, though, their relationship will still be unbreakable in the eyes of God except by death, and would be a sacrament if they were both baptized.

To answer the original question, the Church typically requires weddings to take place in an actual church building because that is the most appropriate setting for a man and woman to pledge their faithful love to each other. Other settings might be beautiful in their own way, but they are not beautiful in the way only a church is beautiful. A church is beautiful because it is the bedchamber of God and his bride. Is it theoretically possible to have a priest or deacon witness a valid marriage outside of the walls of the church? Sure it is. But the best place is a church, therefore most bishops, as the father of the diocesan family, require weddings to be celebrated within their parish churches.