St. Januarius, save me! Joseph Ritz's marriage seemed doomed before vows were even said--that is until an unlikely hero came to the rescue.

It was a warm weekend in May when my wife asked me to top the middle of the road in Naples, New York. "St. Januarius!" she said excitely pointing to a white church of modern design.

"St. Januarius" was not one of her usual expressions, but I knew she was referring to that awful afternoon when the priest refused to marry us.

On our first visit to the young priest in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, he inquired about my religious background. To him I was a stranger--born in a distant Midwestern state, reared in another, educated in Catholic schools and colleges from the West Coast to Milwaukee, and now living in New Haven, Connecticut more than 100 miles away. He wanted to know the name of the parish in which I was registered.

Now there I had a problem. I had grown casual about my religion, only attending Sunday Mass on occasion in the Yale University chapel. I hadn't registered in any parish.

So when the priest insisted on the name of my parish, I was afraid he was going to discover the religious backslider I had become. He would find I was not the devout, loyal Catholic I was pretending to be. He might suspect me of hidden Protestantism, an undependable, weak foundation on which a strong and pure Catholic girl was wrongly depending to help raise a family in the faith.

I thought to impress him with my vast knowledge of obscure Catholic saints. I blurted out, "St. Januarius!"

Ann looked at me in surprise. Poor girl, with her limited public school background she had never heard of the fourth-century Roman bishop.

St. Januarius Parish. I suspect if I had said St. Mary or St. Joseph, he would have gone to another subject and would have never become suspicious.

"St. Januarius?" the curate repeated in a questioning, doubting tone of voice. "That's an unusual name for a church."

I laughed nervously and nodded my head in my most reverential manner. I hoped that would be the end of it, but to my horror, he rose from his chair, strode to a nearby desk, and began paging through the thick Official Catholic Directory, which lists the name and location of every parish in the country. When he came to New Haven, he looked at the listing carefully. He frowned. He looked at several other pages.

There was a St. Catherine, a St. Patrick, a St. Mary, but there was no St. Januarius in all of Connecticut. Possibly there was none in all of New England.

Ann cast me a suspicious glance. I could see she was wondering about the lying suitor she had promised to marry.

Having discredited me once, the priest began probing into other aspects of my past. He demanded a copy of my Army discharge papers on my next visit to the rectory.

My heart dropped. I realized I had another problem. When I was discharged, a careless clerk had put an "X" in the wrong box and incorrectly listed me as married. It was a weekend when I was handed my discharge papers by the first sergeant and the base offices were closed.

After three years in the Army, I wasn't particularly concerned over whether I was being discharged as a married or unmarried soldier. Unwilling to wait until Monday when a correction could be made, I pocketed the papers and thought little more about the matter.

These were the papers I reluctantly handed over to the curate, who I had given good reason to be distrustful of me. During a quick reading, he spotted the damning "X."

"You were married!" he said. His voice expressed his satisfaction in uncovering a divorcee, or perhaps a potential bigamist, or even a closeted Protestant before a Catholic wedding--a wedding that now might never take place.

"No, Father, it was a mistake," I lamely tried to explain.

"They don't make those kind of mistakes," he insisted firmly.

It was no surprise that he refused to marry us. When Ann's family learned of the decision, it confirmed her mother's negative feelings about me, which had begun when she realized I would be taking her daughter far from home. From Ann's family I started receiving the kind of looks a man gets when he is accused of relations with a schoolgirl.

Trying to prove a negative is difficult. To establish that I was never married, I got sworn statements from people in Canton, Ohio who had known me for at least the past 10 years, neighbors, members of my former parishes, my cousins. I got statements from teachers and college classmates at Seattle and Marquette universities. All of them attested that, as far as they knew, I had been unmarried at the time they knew me.

Ultimately the curate's suspicions were laid to rest, and we were wed at a Mass at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Bridgewater.

But in all our married life, which produced five fine children and took us throughout North America--from Hudson Bay to Disney World, from Boston to Seattle--we never found a St. Januarius Church.

Never, that is, until a bright spring day some 21 years after our wedding when we were driving down the main street of Naples, New York and Ann shouted, "Look over on the left!"

I stared at a large modern building of white cement with tear-shaped stained glass windows. In front was a small sign that said: "St. Januarius Roman Catholic Church."

It is a unique and magnificent church in a striking design that invites passersby to pause for a further inspection. But then I always imagined it would be.

JOSEPH RITZ, author of I Never Looked for my Mother and Other Regrets of a Journalist (Booklocker.com Inc., 2006)