Wing and a prayer: pope marries couple on plane over Chile
The bride had walked down the aisle countless times before, usually pushing a
trolley of drinks or reheated food.
She wore a neat uniform with a name badge instead of a white dress, and
probably checked the guests had fastened their seat belts before the
ceremony.
Love was definitely in the air when Pope Francis married two cabin crew
members in an impromptu wedding on a flight taking the pontiff and his entourage
between two Chilean cities.
Paula Podest, 39, and Carlos Ciuffardi, 41, had been married in
the civil service but their planned religious ceremony was scotched when an
earthquake in 2010 almost destroyed their parish church in the Chilean capital,
Santiago.
Seizing an unmissable opportunity, the couple asked Francis to bless their
marriage. But he had something else in mind.
“Do you want me to marry you?” he asked them.
“Here?” they replied, astonished.
The pope said yes and performed a brief ceremony at the front of the plane.
An airline executive was the official witness and a document was signed by a
Chilean bishop on board.
“It was a great surprise and great joy,” said Greg Burke, the Vatican
spokesman. “Everything is valid. Everything is official.”
The Catholic church’s view that civil wedding ceremonies are not valid, and
therefore the couple’s two children, Rafaella, six, and Isabella, three, were born out of wedlock, appears to have been glossed
over.
Podest and Ciuffardi met more than 10 years ago when she was his boss as a
steward for LATAM, Chile’s flagship airline.
As wedding gifts, Francis gave the bride a white rosary and the groom a black
one. He asked Ciuffardi if his wife was still the boss; Ciuffardi laughed and
said yes.
The pope told the couple: “This is what’s missing in the world, the sacrament
of marriage. I hope this motivates couples to marry.”
The couple said they planned to celebrate with a “tiny honeymoon” in the
southern city of Iquique on Thursday night, before flying back to Santiago on
Friday.
In 2016, Francis published a 256-page document, Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of
Love), which acknowledged many of the pressures on modern family life.
Source: The Guardian
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