Our Priest

So, I've told you about our church, but I've never told you about our priest, which is too bad, because Father Mike is awesome.  Like, one of the most awesome priests I've ever met.  The story starts thusly:

Our church is known for holding a lot of weddings; it's how they pay for structural upkeep.  When you commit to a ceremony time, the wedding coordinator asks if you will be using one of the parish priests or bringing your own priest (BYOP, hah!).  My mom thought it would be a nice nod to my childhood parish to ask their incumbent priest to officiate.  We did, and he told us that having our wedding in Saint Louis was treating it as a "destination wedding," that our reasons for holding it there were not sufficient to leave our home church, and essentially we weren't taking our marriage seriously.  It didn't make sense to ask our priest in Columbia to officiate, since we weren't sure if we'd even live in the state at the time of the wedding.  As a person who attends mass every week, I was horrified to be without a priest to officiate our ceremony.  I was a homeless Catholic.

Enter Father Mike.

The St. Francis Xavier wedding coordinator, Ruth, gave us the contact information for her priest friend and we set up a meeting with him.  Father Mike is a Jesuit priest who got a Ph.D. in mathematics at Berkeley in his spare time and now teaches chaos theory at SLU.  He completely understood that the reason we were "homeless" Catholics was because we were still living the semi-nomadic lifestyle of young adults and academics.  He likened himself to a sheepdog, "Most priests shepherd a flock.  Jesuit priests work on the fringes."  And, he was totally nonjudgmental and laid back about everything.  He did an excellent job with our preCana (required Catholic premarital counseling) and has been very reasonable with ceremony planning.  We are so lucky to have him!

As for the first priest we asked: we recently went to a wedding that he officiated, and we were so grateful that we ended up with Father Mike.  He's just a much better fit for our personalities, our outlook on life, and our interpretation of the faith.  We can't wait to have him marry us!