Story by Reagan Scott
LINCOLN (SNR) - On April 8, the Wednesday of Holy Week, Maggie Wesely and Clem Pella were married at St. Teresa Church in Lincoln.
While the wedding they had was very different than the one they had planned, the two are happy to be married.
Originally, Wesely and Pella had planned to get married April 18, the first Saturday after Easter. Wesely said that they were purposefully waiting to get married during the Easter season and experience the Easter joy that comes along with it, even though they could have been married earlier.
As cases of COVID-19 began to spread, Wesely and Pella watched as public gatherings across the nation were limited to groups of 250 people, and then 50, before finally being reduced to 10.
“We said to each other, ‘maybe we need to move our wedding date up,’” Clem Pella said. “And Father (Sean) Kilcawley told us that we might want to think about getting married earlier.”
The couple was worried that Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts would soon issue a stay-at-home order across the state, or that one of them might become ill with COVID-19 before their originally-scheduled wedding was able to take place.
Maggie said, “We kept asking ourselves, ‘What if something’s going to happen?’ There was so much uncertainty and a lot of people we talked to were telling us, ‘Better safe than sorry.’ We didn’t want to wait extra months to get married.”
On Tuesday, April 7, Wesely and Pella received confirmation that they could be married the next day. The next few hours flew by in a whirlwind.
The couple said that they had to reach out to a number of people—their friends and relatives, the concelebrating priests, their organist, the baker, the videographer, the photographer, and the florist to see if they would be able to help out the next day. Both the witnesses they had chosen to participate in the wedding lived out of state, so they had to find new ones. The couple said they were very grateful that all involved were able to rearrange their schedules.
Wesely and Pella weren’t able to use the Easter songs they had picked out, so they had to rearrange the music, choose all of the readings for the Mass, write the petitions and choose the song for their first dance at their reception.
“It was a whirlwind,” Maggie said. “A lot happened in a short amount of time.”
At the wedding the next day, she admitted, there were “a few small mistakes.” They hadn’t had a chance to rehearse, and neither had the camera man, who was livestreaming the Mass.
While it was heartbreaking that neither of their mothers were able to be in attendance, nor any of their siblings, the couple is very glad to be married. Some of the “guests” took photos while viewing the livestream to share with the couple, to show they were sharing in the joyous occasion.
For the couple, the opportunity to receive the sacrament of marriage was what was integral, and they knew all their family and friends were there with them in spirit.
“We were able to focus on what was important,” Clem said.
The couple plans to hold a reception in the future, when all of their family and friends will be able to celebrate together.
“It was a hard decision,” Maggie said, “but in the end, we decided to just go for it and put our trust in God. It feels great to be married. It really is a blessing that we got to spend Easter as a married couple.”
