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friend’s wedding and he said a very smart thing, which was, “Come on. Let’s get in the car and drive up and see our folks.”
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    SR: Through this period my brother had played a very important role. Our parents had focused on their own fears, which was fair enough, but they were not focused on the implications of their attitude. My brother went to our parents and said, “Look, Steve and Cokie are going to get married, and if there is any sort of a breach, any sort of a problem, it’s going to be your fault. All they want is your blessing.” That shocked my parents and forced them to rethink their feelings. My father said to me later that he felt an obligation to urge caution and raise questions while it was still up in the air. But once it was settled, then it was their role to become more supportive. And that’s what happened. But my father never did get used to chicory in his coffee.
    WEDDING
    So now we were engaged, with a wedding to plan—lots of possible potholes along that road! Under the best of circumstances, weddings can drive perfectly loving caring families to the edge of violence. For us, the way we decided some aspects of the ceremony carried the weight of how we would make religious decisions for the rest of our lives. Over the years we’ve watched couples of different faiths work out their marriages and seen three essential models. In many cases, one partner converts, or steps back from any religious input, and the family practices a single faith. For other couples, religion is not important, and simply fades out of their lives. Neither of these options made sense for us. We were too rooted in our own traditions, and too respectful of each other’s, to consider anything but the third version: running our family, and raising our children, with both religions as integral parts of our lives. Easy to say, not so easy to do, and our wedding became the first serious test of our theory. Could we really be both, Catholic and Jewish? Could our relations with our parents, and each other, survive the stress? The whole process, painful as it was at times, taught us a great deal about solving problems, showing patience, focusing on what was truly important. And looking back, it’s clear the wedding became a metaphor for how we would live our lives together. Or at least try.
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    CR: Only a few days after that eventful carriage ride, I made an appointment with a priest in a nearby parish because I didn’t want to waste any time on my way to the aisle. My question for the priest: what was the current state of play in the Church about marrying a non-Catholic, particularly anonbaptized person? I was twenty-two and I was pretty brave about doing this on my own, but I wanted to have all my facts down before I talked to my parents about what I wanted, which was to get married at home. The garden of our house had always been a very special place to me, and I knew it would be much easier for Steve’s family if they didn’t have to actually go into a church, even though it was extremely important to me that it be a Catholic wedding. For years the Church had been, to put it mildly, unwelcoming to non-Catholics, insisting that they marry at home or in the rectory of the church. Then they were allowed inside but on the side altar, then on the main altar but with no nuptial Mass. But, the priest told me, the Second Vatican Council, in a gesture toward other religions, had just recently changed all that—a full nuptial Mass could now be said in a mixed marriage. When I told him that not only did I not want a Mass, but that I wanted to be married at home, he said, “That’s going to be a bit of a public relations problem for us.” He knew that my father’s position as Majority Whip of the House of Representatives would mean the wedding would be in newspapers all over the country and the priest worried that people would think we weren’t allowed to