WEDDING RULE

Evening Star, Issue 20510, 14 June 1930, Page 15

WEDDING RULE

RECTOR'S ORDER MUST GO TO .CHURCH. • NEW YORR, May 23. There is a clergyman in New York who is determined to defend the sanctity of marraige against those who are making a mockery of it. He is the Rev. W. R : Bowie, rector of the famous Grace Church, which is known as New York’s “ Church of the Aristocracy,” and he announces that ho weddings henceforth will bo Eerformed" in his church unless the ride arid bridegroom pledge themselves to attend Christian worship together in tli© place where they reside after mar--IIaSC* LIFELONG UNION. Mr Bowie has drawn up the following formal declaration, which all future couples must sign before he will authorise their marriage ceremony:— “ In requesting to be married according to the rites of the Christian Church, as set forth in the Book ol Common Prayer, we express our purpose to enter a lifelong union of mutual faithfulness and devotion. “We realise that marriage can be made permanently happy and enriched only by the cultivation of those qualities of self-control, forbearance, and unselfish love which religious ideals can help to create, and therefore fqr our own sakes and for the sake of the home which we hope to establish we will seek to associate ourselves for worship and fellowship with some Christian church in the community where wo reWae " CONFERENCE REQUEST. Mr Bowie says that his action is the result of the apparent lightness with which the ybunger generation is entering matrimony. Ho further states that the bride and bridegroom must confer with Mm on© day before their wedding ceremony is performed, and if they are unknown to him they must establish to • his satisfaction that there is no impediment to their marriage, and they must give him the name of the church of. their preference, so that he can send the. presiding clergyman their names and addresses. ■ , ' . Mr Bowie is among the foremost modernists of the New York clergy, with a wide reputation for scholarship, and he recently . declined the post of Coadinter Bishop of Pennsylvania. The Grace Church has been the scene of many fashionable weddings, including that of the Duke of Marlborough to Miss Consuelo Vanderbilt in 189 u, which ended in a divorce in 1920.