No-Nonsense Priest Cancels Wedding Mid-Ceremony

An excerpt from Your Tango - 

Priest Cancels Wedding Mid-Ceremony After Seeing A Joke Written On The Groom's Shoe During The Blessing

It was a hacky, sexist joke and the priest definitely wasn't laughing.

By John Sundholm

Douglas Mendes | Pexels

It used to be standard procedure for men to constantly tell jokes that were essentially, at their core, about how much they hate their wives. "The ol' ball and chain," "Take my wife ... Please," and all the other dumb, hacky variations on the theme all hinge on the same basic theme cleverly reworded: I dislike the woman I'm married to.

Wedding traditions like smashing cake in your wife's face fall into this category, too. Sometimes it's cute and playful, but we've all seen the videos of grooms crossing the line in an awkward way that makes it clear they took the cake moment as an opportunity to vent a bit of the vitriol clearly simmering under the surface. A lot of this has fallen out of favor in recent years, or is at least frowned upon by many. Count Brazilian priest Father Fábio Marinho among them, who recently called off a wedding over this type of joke.

A priest canceled a wedding over a joke written on the groom's shoe.

Father Fábio Marinho, a Catholic priest in the Uberlândia region of Brazil, was recently conducting a wedding as usual, when he noticed a strange commotion going on during the ceremony, and during one of its most sacred parts no less.

Marinho told the "LendaCast" podcast he was giving the blessing to the marriage, and as the bride and groom knelt before him, he heard laughter coming from the assembled congregation.

The groom had pasted 'help me' to the bottom of his shoe, and the priest was not amused.

"They knelt for me to give the blessing, and the church started laughing," Marinho said. "I thought: something's happened."

After surveying the scene, the priest realized the groom had played a "hilarious" little prank for the wedding. On the bottom of his shoe, he'd pasted a message reading "Help me; get me out of here," so that when they knelt to pray, the congregation would see it.

A relatively harmless prank, of course, but the punchline of it all is hacky, dumb, sexist rhetoric from 50 years ago. "Oh no, don't make me marry this woman" is basically the punchline, which is weird. Nobody's forcing you to be there, my guy! "When I saw what was in the groom's shoe, I took it off and got it," Marinho said. And to say Marinho was not amused is an understatement.

The priest invalidated the marriage on the spot because the groom wasn't taking it seriously.

https://www.yourtango.com/self/priest-cancels-wedding-mid-ceremony-over-grooms-joke