Mail-Order Marriage

Damian Goldie took his telephone off the hook last week and left it off. His reason: a newspaper story about his activities had resulted in a flood of calls from "undesirables." But the publicity spotlighted a service that seems to be increasingly desirable to British Roman Catholics and perhaps to the church as well: a Catholic marriage bureau.

Disturbed by the growing number of mixed marriages and the resulting high percentage of fallen-away Catholics, former government clerk Goldie, 38, set up his marriage bureau eleven years ago in his London home, drastically cut the usual fees from about -L-20 a person to only -L-2 or -L-3. So far he has arranged at least 500 marriages, has "quite large numbers" of nuptials in the works. "Unfortunately," he explained last week, "70% of those who come to us are women in their middle thirties looking for husbands in the professional classes. Our men are more apt to be of the laboring type. But there are very few complaints or letters asking for the money back."

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