Priests, Catholic marriage and weddings?

You can have your wedding 'convalidated' by the Catholic church at a later date. If you google this you will find out the steps to do it. Basically it legitimatizes a marriage in the eyes of the church 'after the fact'. I feel your frustration, seriously, because I have been going crazy trying to figure out what kind of ceremony to have. I was raised Catholic, but my fiance was not, and we considered having a married priest (www.rentapriest.com) perform our ceremony so we could incorporate his traditions as well and make the ceremony a little more familiar to his Protestant family. In the end, we decided to go with a Catholic ceremony in the church after all, because it's important to me, important to my family, etc. and his family is pretty easy going about religion.... But I really appreciate the difficulty of pleasing two sets of parents, and most of all having a ceremony that is meaningful to you. But anyway, getting the marriage convalidated at a later date could be an option in your case. We considered this too at one point. good luck!