Posted on 01/23/2006 7:12:44 AM PST by NYer
SAFETY HARBOR - Michael Schiavo and Jodi Centonze were married in a private ceremony at Espiritu Santo Catholic Church on Saturday.
"It was very emotional," said John Centonze, brother of the bride, just after the noon ceremony. "It's been a long time coming. A lot of things happened in between."
The wedding came a day after the couple applied for a Pinellas County marriage license and 10 months after the death of Schiavo's first wife, Terri.
Terri Schiavo died March 31, two weeks after her feeding tube was removed, and 15 years after a cardiac arrest that left her in what most doctors called a persistent vegetative state. Her death was a most public process, with the Florida Legislature, Congress, the courts, pundits and interest groups weighing in.
The wedding, in contrast, was private. Mindful of the media circus that had whirled about Terri Schiavo's hospice for weeks, along with throngs of protesters, the families kept the time and location of Saturday's ceremony a secret. Three St. Petersburg Times journalists arrived at the church, but were asked not to go in.
Schiavo wore a black tuxedo and Centonze wore a long, flowing, white wedding gown. Their two children attended. The bride and groom did not make any public comment.
"Except for the fact that the world knows their name, it was like any wedding you've ever been to," said Michael Hirsh, who attended, and who is helping Schiavo write a book titled Terri: The Truth.
Hirsh estimated about 80 people attended. The priest offered no homily. Afterward the wedding party went to a reception at East Lake Country Club.
"It was just a beautiful ceremony," Hirsh said. "Everyone there was just extremely happy for them."
Hirsh said, "There weren't a lot of dry eyes in the place."
Centonze agreed. "I had a couple tears," he said.
Schiavo and Jodi Centonze met in a dentist's office and began dating a few years later. Terri Schiavo already had suffered her accident, and already was living in a nursing home.
Schiavo referred to Jodi Centonze as his fiancee for more than five years, as the Terri Schiavo case worked its way through the court system, and the halls of the Florida Legislature and Congress.
Some of Schiavo's friends compared him during this time to a man whose wife had Alzheimer's disease; he still loved his wife but also wanted companionship. But in the superheated rhetoric of Terri Schiavo's last months, critics called him an adulterer because he had taken up with another woman while still married.
In 1990, cardiac arrest deprived Terri Schiavo of oxygen for five minutes. Doctors eventually diagnosed her as being in a persistent vegetative state, meaning she was not conscious of her surroundings.
However, Terri Schiavo's family sharply disagreed and consulted doctors who disputed or doubted the diagnosis of a persistent vegetative state. They hoped to keep her alive and give her extensive therapy.
An autopsy concluded that Terri Schiavo never would have recovered from the brain damage she suffered during her 1990 collapse. Doctors have never competely understood what brought on her initial cardiac arrest.
They seem to have removed the bright line, or moved it into storage.
Let him tell a good enough story and people will buy the book. "Reality" doesn't count any more.
That would not be enough- Felos would just get a law changed to make sure Michael could do in wife #2.
"We are currently updating our definition for Treason. We hope to have the definition for Treason available within the next few weeks. Please visit us soon."
Careful, the Jesuits aren't all liberal. Don't be too quick to judge the Society based on those in front of a camera, or with a byline.
Is there anything that actually prevents a Catholic marriage under circumstances such as this one? Of course Michael Schaivo was not charged nor convicted of murder, but the Pope himself came out against his actions.
As for the wedding dress, personally I think it is tacky as hell for someone who has been married once before to wear a white wedding dress. In this situation, it is just really awful. I don't know why they just didn't have the wedding at George Felos home.
"We are currently updating our definition for Treason. We hope to have the definition for Treason available within the next few weeks. Please visit us soon."
Lol! Doesn't that figure. Good to see you again : )
I'm glad to hear that bit of news. Thank you.
You know, there are quite a few people who think it is equally evil to force a body to keep functioning after the person occupying it is long gone.
She had better sleep with both eyes open.
Any Freepers who are insurance agents: I have a hot lead for you.
Yo, John Centonze: If MS wanted to marry my sister ... he wouldn't. Wouldn't even get close. Big, big swamps in Fla.
For those recommending insurance to the co-conspirator, she is an insurance agent. Sold her biz to a Philly-area firm. That's where MS hails from.
Did Jodi C. sell MS the policy on Terri?
Did she meet MS before Terri was damaged and left unattended for so long by her EMS-trained husband?
There is a great book in this story but it isn't his. It would be about him though.
Good, you date Michael then. Now, that's he's married, he's eligible again.
It is true that the Jesuits aren't all liberal-but I'd bet that 95% of those who are conservative are those who are in retirement homes for religious. I did meet a conservative Jesuit once in the past several years; I thought it telling that when I asked what order he was in he glanced furtively around the room (which was full of conservative Catholics) and said, "Don't hold it against me, but" (this last in a near-whisper) "I'm a Jesuit."
Of course, he was partly hamming it up, but he certainly had a point.
As a non-Catholic, this sort of thing reaffirms my sense that the Catholic Church is a bad joke. One of the reasons Michael Schiavo was so eager to violate the Church's teachings re end-of-life measures, was because he couldn't divorce Terri and still remarry in the Catholic Church. So he cohabited and reproduced with Jodi for years, in violation of Church teaching, while pursuing his legal battle to pull her feeding tube, in violation of Church teaching, so that he and Jodi could get married in the Catholic Church. And now they have. What a joke. This is right up there with Cardinal Law getting yanked out of Boston for years of illegal and immoral enabling of child molestors, and ending up in a cushy position at the Vatican, helping officiate at the installation of the new Pope.
shameful and obscene....
If this one wasn't a public scandal, nothing anymore is a public scandal. I wish there were some way to voice displeasure with the diocese for allowing this travesty, but unless you are a contributor down in St. Pete, there seems to be no way.
however, there are so many questions requarding how Terri "fell" into this cardiac arrest bit and how she was allowed to lanquish in her bed without the full support of physical, occupational,and speech therapies that removing her feeding tube after so many years was for all practical purposes, murder by convenience....
Terri's case was unusual in that she didn't require any mechanical support to stay alive, just food and water through a tube. Which is why pulling the tube was against Catholic teaching. The Catholic Church does not require continuation of artificial life support, such as respirators.
Personally, I wouldn't want to be kept alive in the condition Terri was in. But that's me, and this is a free country, in which Terri's wishes, and not mine, are supposed to govern Terri's life and death. And the only real evidence available of what Terri would have wanted in this situation is derivative, from the fact that she was clearly a practicing Catholic, and the Catholic teaching is that someone requiring only food and water adminstration to stay alive, should be sustained.
Though I'm quite in favor of assisted suicide and euthanasia for people who have clearly expressed a wish for it, I strongly opposed the pulling of Terri's feeding tube. There is no reliable evidence that Terri ever expressed such a wish, and circumstantial evidence that she wouldn't have (i.e. her demonstrated faith in a Church which teaches that withholding sustenance in a such a situation is wrong). And her parents' case for keeping her alive was greatly bolstered, IMO, by the fact that they pledged to care for her at their own expense. They were not asking the courts to sock the taxpayers with the bills for keeping her alive, in a condition that most of those taxpayers wouldn't view as worth living in.
<< Terri Schiavo "died" March 31, two weeks after "her feeding tube was removed," and 15 years after "a cardiac arrest" that "left her" in what "most doctors" called "a persistent vegetative state." >>
Rubbish.
One two-bit liberal "judge," never having sought to investigate Mr Shiavo's role in having caused her condition, said she was in that state.
The rest of us, including almost the entire medical profession and every objective Lawman, believed then and believe still that Ms Shiavo was the victim of a slow torture and murder at the hands, from that torture and murder's beginning to its end, of Mr Shiavo and his small army of carefully-cloned and similarly-secularly-cynical cohorts.
What was that, again, that 'in hoc signo vinces' feller said about a specially-reserved place in Hell for this souless creep? I'll second that!
And, lest I forget: Dear Lord, please continue to bless your servant, Terri and to forever see to the peaceful rest of her immortal soul. Thank You, Dear Lord. Amen - Brian
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