Invitation wording advice

We're very aware we're married, but because we're practicing Catholics, we don't consider ourselves fully (religiously, spiritually) married in the Church, with all that that entails. We will be treating the March ceremony as the date we actually committed our lives to each other (in terms of celebrating anniversaries etc.)

So my question is: how do we word the invitations to capture this? I don't want to lie to our guests (and to be honest, I don't think any of them will really care that we're already married). It's not a celebration of marriage because there's a long Catholic ceremony involved. It's also not a vow renewal because we haven't been sacramentally married in the Church before. Any advice?

That is a lot to unpack.....

The date you got married in court is your wedding day. Your church date is technically, a convocation, which is fairly common. And your church wedding is, honestly, for show.

I would probably just call it a celebration of marriage; honestly, because I can't think of what else you could call it.

Why do you need to capture that you were already legally married in your wedding invitations. You're not lying to anyone. It's no one else's business. Just send out wedding invitations as you normally would have. If I got a wedding invitation that said anything but "wedding" or " marriage" I would be very confused, Catholic, or otherwise.

I agree that you are already married.

I suggest you have an intimate family only ceremony and invite your other guests to a celebration of your marriage.

If the church and its teachings are important to you, you can't lie and call it a wedding.

I think a celebration of marriage is appropriate, because that's what you're doing!

Mr and Mrs Lastname

request the honor of your presence

To celebrate the marriage of

Your Name

And

Spouse's Name

You could check out wedding websites like minted.com to see how they format them. And even put your own twist on them. Just so you get an idea of wording.

Thanks for the advice all!

@Celia, thanks for the technical term. I suspect that if we called it a convocation, our guests would be even more confused.

@Erin, I don't want to make it seem like we're not already married when we are. I don't think anyone will really care, but for those that do, I don't want to lure them under false pretenses.

@muriel, it would be really odd to have a family-only ceremony in my culture. Churches are ordinarily open to anyone that wants to attend, and many of our guests will be particularly confused if they weren't invited to the ceremony.

Would it be weird to call it a celebration of marriage and still invite people to the church ceremony? They obviously don't have to attend if they don't want to.

Id say something like "invite you to witness the sacrament of marriage"

That is, indeed, a convalidation and Goldfisch had great advice to call it the sacrament, which it is

That sounds great, thank you all!