A priest caused huge upset at a Wicklow wedding when he refused to begin the mass until the couple’s decorations had been taken down from around the church.
He was said to be unhappy with the fact that the couple had added trees to the ends of several pews without speaking to him first.
The couple’s wedding planner Edel Cooney was left in tears as she tried to deal with the situation which the bride was “only very slightly aware of”.
The bride Jennie told Joe Duffy on Liveline, “[The groom] first told me it was awful, that Edel was in tears, in regard to the priest, he is actually a lovely man, and the ceremony he did was fantastic.”
She added, “The only thing we were told was not to stick anything with thumbtacks or blue tack to the walls or pews, which we didn’t do.”
Edel Cooney is a wedding planner. She’s telling @joeliveline that one of her weddings in Co. Wicklow was delayed by an hour when the priest demanded her decorations were removed from the church. The decorations looked something like the example below #Liveline pic.twitter.com/0lJX5lwQXh
— Liveline (@rteliveline) October 4, 2018
The couple’s ceremony was delayed by an hour after the priest insisted that the eight trees had to be removed from the church.
The groom explained, “There was a voicemail from the priest and it was just carnage. I said to my two brothers, we need to go to the church.
“The first thing I saw was Edel in tears, so I said ‘don’t worry about it.’
“The priest made a bee-line for me as we walked in the gates. I said ‘what’s the issue?’, and he said it was totally unacceptable, that this wasn’t a big party. And I said ‘I’m not doing this wedding unless it’s sorted.'”
Jennie said she was left “disappointed” when she arrived to see the trees had been put outside the church instead of along the aisle.