Please fasten your seatbelts

Whenever Pope Francis gets on an airplane, interesting things seem to happen.  But the Holy Father's flight yesterday from Santiago to Iquique may have broken all previous interesting-pope-flight records, and shattered the awesome-Pope barrier for good measure.   CNN has the report:

As far as Catholic weddings go, it's pretty hard to beat being married by the Pope. On an airplane.  But that's what happened Thursday morning when Pope Francis married two flight attendants in an impromptu ceremony on his papal plane some 36,000 feet over Chile.

The article explains that the flight attendants already were civilly married, but their planned church wedding was derailed back in 2010 when an earthquake destroyed their church venue.   So the pope took care of it, on the spot.  He pulled over a witness from among the passengers, and personally did the honors as presider.  A cardinal in the Holy Father's travelling party hand-wrote a certificate of marriage, which can be seen here:

The teeny-tiny signature over "Celebrante" appears to simply say "Francisco".

A few miscellaneous thoughts:

My initial reaction, which I'm sure many people will share, is: "How cool is that?"  On its own merits, it's a wonderful story.

My second reaction is sort of perplexed admiration.  Not to go all chancery-bureaucrat on the Holy Father, but the fact is, Francis cut about a hundred corners, and broke one or two rules, in this little spur-of-the-moment tying of the knot.  If I were to run into a civilly-married couple at a ball game or in a tavern, or even on an airplane, they may wish me to marry them on the spot, and I may wish to do so, but I'm not permitted to do it right then and there.  The rule is, Catholic weddings have to take place in a Catholic church.  And for that to happen, a whole series of preparatory and paperwork hoops must be jumped through.  Any sort of dispensation from those rules has to come from an authority higher than me.  Now, if the pope doesn't have that dispensing authority, nobody does.  So no gripes from me if he gave himself a waiver.  But it would be even cooler if your humble servant and his fellow poor schlub deacons, not to mention priests, could have a little more flexibility, too.  Some people want to have their wedding in a Scottish castle, or on a Pacific beach as the sun sets, or in Disney World.  But, as a general rule, they can't, if they want it to be a Catholic wedding.  Certainly, rules tend to be in place for sound reasons.  But meeting people where they are also can be a sound pastoral strategy, and sad to say, among the places where young people likely aren't these days is inside a church.

My third reaction is that a damn-the-rules-full-speed-ahead approach, occasionally observable in Francis, is something that many people find admirable,  but which drives other people up the wall and around the bend - I suspect this difference in attitude is a big reason that so many other church officials clearly find Francis unsettling.  I suppose it depends on one's attitude toward rules.  Francis doesn't seem to get too hung up on them.  I wonder if he's sending a signal about rules and flexibility to clergy around the world?

At any rate, congratulations to the happy couple, Paula Podest Ruiz and Carlos Ciuffardi Elorriga.  And may God continue to bless the Argentinian independent thinker and instinctive media genius whom the Holy Spirit placed on Peter's chair - which on this particular flight presumably was somewhere in the first-class section.  As for us, we should put our tray tables upright and in the locked position, because when you get on a plane with Francis, turbulence is pretty much guaranteed.  You just might disembark a changed person.  Even married.