Married couples blessed by Bishop

By Tanya Connor
 The Catholic Free Press

WORCESTER – It wasn’t love at first sight – things got off on the wrong foot after a dance.
But between then and now Ralph and Claire Weirich have participated in Marriage Encounter, done Couple to Couple marriage preparation, taught natural family planning and done pro-life ministry.
Sunday they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary at a special Mass for couples around the diocese.
The Weirichs said this was the first time they’ve attended this Mass, held annually at their parish, St. Paul Cathedral.
“We missed the 25th,” Mrs. Weirich said, so they really wanted to come for their 50th.
At Mass Bishop McManus congratulated the couples and thanked them for the example of their “faithfulness and love with which you have blessed all of us.”
Allison LeDoux, director of the diocesan Office of Marriage and Family, which organizes the Mass, said the 31 couples who had registered had a cumulative total of 1,191 years of marriage. She read their names and anniversary numbers – from first to 68th – and Bishop McManus led them in a blessing. At the reception afterwards they had their pictures taken with the bishop and received congratulatory certificates he had signed.
Asked how they met, the Weirichs told The Catholic Free Press their story.
“I was a student nurse at City Hospital doing my duty to bring cheer and comfort” to enlisted men, Mrs. Weirich said of that day in 1965. “We went through the YWCA” on a bus that took young women to a dance at Fort Devens.
Mr. Weirich was one of those enlisted men. He hadn’t met her before; he said he just walked over and started dancing with her. At the end of the night he said good-bye, but didn’t walk her to the bus like other G.I.s did for the other young women.
“I was furious,” Mrs. Weirich said. But now she figures, “It was ignorance. … In Illinois (where he came from) I guess they don’t do those things.”
It wasn’t love at first sight, but “maybe love at second or third sight,” she said.     
“The second time I did everything right, I guess,” Mr. Weirich said. “We’re still here.”
“We’re both blessed; it had to be the hand of God,” his wife added.
They married on April 12, 1969 at St. Peter Parish in Worcester, where she grew up. Now they have four children and 10 grandchildren.
“I don’t know how you can survive marriage in this society without God … being the center of your marriage,” Mrs. Weirich said. “And praying as a couple. Couples who pray together really do have a better chance of staying together.”
She said she thought the Marriage Encounter movement kept them closer and helped them ignore things that tend to pull marriages apart. They said they made their Marriage Encounter weekend in August 1976, and have been involved since then, meeting about once a month in a sharing group with other couples.
Participating in Marriage Encounter, and using and teaching natural family planning, are gifts that really enhanced their relationship, she said.
Mr. Weirich spoke of relationship in terms of 100 percent, not 50: “I give her 100 percent and she gives me 100 percent.”
“As much as we can,” his wife added.
The couple has also tried to help mothers give life to their babies by working with Problem Pregnancy and 40 Days for Life. Mrs. Weirich called abortion a tragedy for babies, mothers, fathers and families, a tragedy that hurts her heart so much. Her husband said fathers don’t have any say when their children are aborted.
“How can you destroy a child and not have a lasting effect – at some point in your life?” Mrs. Weirich asked.
In his homily at the wedding anniversary Mass Bishop McManus spoke about the importance of self sacrifice. He read from an instruction that priests used to give couples at weddings.
He asked listeners to pray over these words.
“You are about to enter into a union which is most sacred and most serious, a union which was established by God himself,” the exhortation says. Thus he sanctified human love and enabled couples to “help each other live as children of God, by sharing a common life under his fatherly care.”
Marriage requires “a complete and unreserved giving of self.” Though they don’t know that future, couples “take each other for better or for worse … until death.”
And since these words involve such solemn obligations “it is most fitting that you rest the security of your wedded life on the great principle of self sacrifice,” beginning “by the voluntary and complete surrender of your individual lives in the interest of that deeper and wider life which you two are to have in common,” couples are told.
“We are willing to give in proportion as we love. And when love is perfect, the sacrifice is complete. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, and the Son so loved us that he gave himself for our salvation.”

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