COVID curbs anniversary Mass

By Tanya Connor
The Catholic Free Press

Then Bishop Timothy J. Harrington invited everyone to their weekday-Mass wedding, where his prayer brought the bride instant healing. He even lent them his car for their honeymoon.
Last Friday that couple celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary with prayers and a blessing of rings at another regularly scheduled weekday Mass at their parish, St. John’s in Worcester.
“This celebration will be on the very same day of the week and almost at the same time as our marriage at St. John Parish on Friday, October 30, 1970!” John and Therese Boucher wrote in an email and Facebook post to family and friends. The message invited people to watch the Mass on the parish’s Facebook page instead of attending in person, due to concerns about the coronavirus.
Concerns about the virus also led to the cancellation of the annual diocesan wedding anniversary Mass at St. Paul Cathedral, at which couples are recognized by number of years married and receive a blessing from the bishop. After Mass, they get their photos taken with the bishop and pick up their congratulatory certificates.
This year, Allison LeDoux, director of the diocesan Office of Marriage and Family, who organizes the Mass, announced that couples could celebrate in their own parishes and could ask for the bishop’s congratulations to be mailed to them. She said 76 couples, celebrating from 10 to 70 years of marriage, signed up for these certificates. She calculated that the years of marriage totaled 2,994.
As usual, The Catholic Free Press will be featuring some of their stories, starting this week with the Bouchers, whose golden wedding anniversary celebration was curbed by the virus.
John Boucher was from the Class of 1970 at the College of the Holy Cross, Therese from Anna Maria College’s Class of 1969. As college students they ministered together on retreat-like Antioch Weekends and helped lead charismatic prayer meetings at Holy Cross.
“I kind of didn’t like her,” Mr. Boucher said. “She had a reputation for praying two hours a day, and I knew I could never live up to that level of holiness.”
“And then it all reversed when we had children,” added Mrs. Boucher, who became a stay-at-home mother of five, and now has an added five grandchildren.
Before their marriage, Mr. Boucher would transport people for faith-sharing groups. He would drop her off last so they could pray together.
“But he was always late,” Mrs. Boucher said. “I told him, ‘If you are on time next week, I will pray for you for the rest of my life.’ I knew when the doorbell rang” – on time – “I was in trouble.”
Mr. Boucher said he left an hour and a half early for the 15-minute drive to her house that day – and got there barely in time.
His explanation? The car broke down on the rough roads.
At one point, each of them was engaged to someone else. When those relationships ended, they prayed, separately, “Show me who to marry.”
While working together with other volunteers and Bishop Harrington at St. John Parish they fell in love, Mr. Boucher said. The clergyman, then auxiliary bishop of the diocese, had them visiting people in their homes.
“We didn’t know how to evangelize,” Mr. Boucher said. So they would say, “Hi. We’re from St. John’s. Would you like to talk about the pope and the sacraments?”
“Almost everyone invited us in – even the Jewish people,” he said.
One day John told Therese, “I realize I’m in love with you.”
“I said, ‘That’s nice,’” she recalled, explaining that she didn’t trust that statement; she knew two other young women he’d been serious about and broken up with.
“But I began to notice … he was the kindest person, and anyone who had a problem would go to him,” and he would talk and pray with them, she said. “It was his kindness that won me over.”
Mrs. Boucher said they wanted to be married missionaries.
“We both felt called to lay ministry, which at the time didn’t exist,” she said. (After they married, they took turns getting their master’s degrees in religious education from Assumption College.)
They planned their wedding for the regularly scheduled Friday evening Mass in St. John’s lower church, where he always played the guitar and she sang.
“I had started working at the Green Island Neighborhood Center,” Mr. Boucher said. “I was in the street talking to people and I just invited them to the wedding.”
Bishop Harrington too invited whoever he was talking to, and they ended up with 300-400 people, the Bouchers said. Mrs. Boucher said the bishop wondered whether it would be a charismatic Mass and perhaps wanted to show it off.
That happened unexpectedly. Mrs. Boucher said she had huge canker sores, which dissolved when Bishop Harrington laid his hand on her during the marriage rite. “It was extraordinary, because nothing like that had ever happened to me,” she said, adding that the bishop had a gift of healing. “I was so happy I started singing in tongues.”
Her husband and about 80 guests involved in the charismatic renewal spontaneously joined in, using this gift of the Holy Spirit, in which people praise God in languages unknown to them. A wedding guest said, “That’s a beautiful song; what page is it on?”
To illustrate their “promise to live in voluntary poverty … for the sake of the Gospel,” they laid roses at the statue of Mary, Mr. Boucher said. They spent their lives working for the Church and therefore “never had to worry about having too much money,” he said.
They were poor from the start.
 “Bishop Harrington lent us his car to go on our honeymoon,” Mrs. Boucher said. She said there were various problems with using the car the bishop had rented for them, so he let them take his car for the weekend – and told them not to park at any hotels until they got out of Worcester County, where people would recognize his license plate!
At last Friday’s Mass the Bouchers stood before St. John’s present pastor, Father John F. Madden, and a small congregation and prayed, “Blessed are you, Lord, for in the good and the bad times of our life you have stood lovingly by our side. Help us, we pray, to remain faithful in our love for one another, so that we may be true witnesses to the covenant you have made with humankind.”