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.
shulers | Shutterstock 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.
"I said, 'Look, this is an impediment to me validating your marriage. Therefore, the wedding is canceled,'" Marinho went on to say. He told the groom, "You'll have to go through all the necessary procedures and decide if you really want to marry her."
Marinho very clearly felt slighted; now imagine the man's wife-to-be. "This isn't a joke or theater," he said. "Leave the jokes for the party with your guests. I'm not there to celebrate something that isn't serious."
So he decided to give the groom what he said he wanted: An out. "If the groom is asking for help, he doesn't want it. In the name of the Church, I am obliged, by canon law, to suspend the marriage. The marriage becomes invalid," he explained.
Douglas Mendes | Pexels
On one hand, lighten up, Father. And to be fair, Marinho's concerns seem to be much more about religious ideas of sanctity than anything else. But as with all pranks, this one comes down to two questions: What's the punchline, and is the butt of the joke, his wife, in on it, or being humiliated at her own wedding?
Whether or not she was in on it, nobody seems to know, but the obvious punchline is, of course, that he doesn't want to be "tied down" by some irritating woman for the rest of his life. And as an insufferable killjoy who's only had the right to get married for 10 years and whose right to do so is constantly under political attack because of the supposed "sanctity" of this institution that straight people treat with all the care and concern of a haircut, I'd like to say:
If you don't want to get married, then don't! You have free will! Go live on your own! Ah, but then you won't have some maid legally bound to you like some trophy, and you'll have to do your own laundry or whatever. This is quite a dilemma. I don't know how you guys manage it!
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
