Deacon Tim provided a beautiful service. As stressful as these days can be, it was nice to have an officiant that made our ceremony special.

Good things: The church is gorgeous, and I was very happy to be married in my home church. There was enough space for all of our guests, and the setup was great for having a large bridal party, having a pianist and an organ player, etc. Our initial planning meeting was very helpful, and they were very flexible with allowing us to bring in a priest from another state and giving him flexibility over what to include in the Mass, whether to allow us to sit rather than kneel through the whole thing (thankfully), where to stand/sit, and so on.

Not-so-good things: There is some lack of communication between the staff there, and this was not only frustrating to us, but also a bit upsetting when things were suddenly judged to be our fault. For example, we specifically asked during our planning meeting whether our out-of-town priest needing to do anything specific, send any paperwork, etc., and we were told he could do whatever he wanted, so we operated under that assumption. We were then, several months later, reprimanded by Holy Spirit's priest for not having our paperwork in. My now-husband called to find out what paperwork we were missing and was told by the wedding coordinator that we were fine, everything was taken care of. This same person then called us in a panic three weeks later to say we were missing paperwork. Our priest called to find out what to send and no one returned his call. It was just a huge mess. Additionally, we were supposed to be assigned a wedding hostess a week in advance; our hostess apparently bailed and turned over the wedding to another hostess, who was on vacation at the time and had no idea the wedding had been given to her. We eventually ended up with THREE hostesses who didn't talk to each other enough so at the rehearsal we were asked EVERY question two or three times because of their lack of communication. The head wedding hostess then argued with us at the rehearsal about where to sign the marriage license after the ceremony (we didn't want to do it in the sanctuary because we had a time crunch -- the church required us to be out of there less than an hour after the ceremony ended -- and we knew people would take a long time to recess out). The DAY OF the wedding, she then informed my matron of honor and the photographer that we would be signing the license in the sanctuary after pictures and told my matron of honor to tell me, which she did as we were recessing out after the ceremony. Since we had no desire and no time to do it that way, and nobody except the hostess cared about the pictures of the signing being in the sanctuary, we just gathered everyone together in the original location and did it there anyway.

So basically, just a massive lack of communication characterizes the church staff, BUT if you have a lot of patience, if your wedding isn't too complicated, and you're looking for a beautiful place to have a ceremony, this is it.