This was not the wedding that Alyssa Bello and Christian Messina had imagined.
Like so many other couples affected by the coronavirus, Ms. Bello said it was “an emotional roller coaster” to get to their May 30 ceremony at St. Athanasius, a Roman Catholic church in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.
The couple met in December 2015 at Kettle Black, a sports bar in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Each was with a group of friends. They started talking and exchanged phone numbers. A couple of weeks later they had their first date.
In April 2016, he invited her to attend his nephew’s christening. She found herself sitting with his parents at a table, but without Mr. Messina because he was at the dais table as his nephew’s godfather. She said she was “very nervous” and was surprised when his uncle introduced her to everyone as “Christian’s girlfriend.”
They had never discussed their couple status before that moment. And, in a similar fashion, their relationship “just got more serious over time,” she said. Even though they didn’t discuss marriage, each “realized that we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together and one day start a family,” she added.
Ms. Bello, 27, taught kindergarten for two years at Our Lady of Guadalupe Academy in Bensonhurst, the same parochial school she attended as a child. She graduated from Brooklyn College and just received a master’s degree in education there, too, but the graduation ceremony had to be held online because of the virus.
Mr. Messina, 30, was born in Brooklyn, raised in Staten Island and is a vice president of Lennox Advisors, a wealth advisory firm in Manhattan. He graduated from SUNY Oswego with a degree in risk management and insurance.
Once Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo allowed wedding licenses to be issued online and then allowed religious gatherings of 10 people, the wedding could go forward. Msgr. David L. Cassato, sporting a black mask with the words “Faith over Fear,” performed the wedding ceremony, but not a public Mass, because of the gathering restrictions. The couple had trimmed their guest list from 300 to about a dozen inside the church, which seats 600. About 20 more stood outside, watching a livestream of the ceremony on their phones.
The event was welcome relief for Monsignor Cassato, who is both the pastor of St. Athanasius and a New York Police Department chaplain. He said at the height of the Covid-19 deaths in New York, he was officiating at “eight graveside burials a week.”
“It’s been a very sad experience and a real heavy burden,” he said. “This is the first real joyful moment during the pandemic and I want to try to make this as joyful as possible for them.”
As soon as the pandemic hit, the couple knew they would have to postpone their party so their parents and grandparents would not be at risk. But they did not want to delay the wedding.
When their brief ceremony ended, the couple greeted those outside the church. Then, back in the sacristy, they cut a small vanilla wedding cake with cookies and cream frosting.
On the cake were the words “You & me & Quarantine.”
“It wasn’t the wedding we anticipated having a year ago when we got engaged” the groom said, “but at the end of the day, we wanted to get married, and we did.”
Also by the end of the day, they had moved into an apartment in Dumbo, Brooklyn, their first place together.