Joining hands, still wearing the rings they first put on their fingers decades earlier, they recited the familiar phrases: “in good times and bad,” “in sickness and in health,” “love you and honor you.”
More than 140 couples renewed their commitment to each other at the Wedding Anniversary Mass June 19 at Saint Gianna Beretta Molla Parish in Northfield. Bishop Dennis Sullivan celebrated the Mass for couples who have been married 25, 50 or 60 years.
The Mass was celebrated only days after Pope Francis made news by saying that most people today do not understand that sacramental marriage is a bond that binds them to each other for life.
Raising a point he has raised before, and one also raised by now-retired Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis insisted June 16 that the validity of a marriage
implies that a couple understands that sacramental marriage is a bond that truly binds them to another for their entire lives.
“We are living in a culture of the provisional,” he told participants in the Diocese of Rome’s annual pastoral conference.
But after 25, 50 or 60 years, there was nothing provisional between the husbands and wives in Northfield who, before the bishop and other priests of the diocese, joined in singing the recessional hymn “God, Who Created Hearts to Love.”
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