Pop singer and nude photo enthusiast Britney Spears has publicly smeared the Catholic Church for not hastily marrying her and now-husband Sam Asghari upon request.
In a now-deleted Instagram post, Spears shared a photo of an unidentified couple being married in a Catholic Church, expressing she had hoped the same for her and Sam Asghari. According to Spears, the church did not outright grant her request and asked that she become Catholic while presumably undergoing marriage preparation.
“I wanted to go every Sunday… it’s beautiful and they said it was temporarily shut down due to COVID!!!! Then 2 years later when I wanted to get married there they said I had to be catholic and go through TEST!!!!” Spears said.
“Isn’t church supposed to be open to all????” she questioned.
In order to be married in the Catholic Church, at least one person in the couple has to have been baptized Catholic or to have converted to Catholicism. Though Spears expressed interest in Catholicism after having been raised Baptist, she never formally joined the Church while Asghari has expressed no public religious affiliation, with reports indicating his parents were Muslim.
Despite the setback, Spears and Asghari did eventually marry at a private ceremony hosted at the pop singer’s home.
Wherever Brittney Spears stands on faith, Catholics did rally to her cause recently when reports surfaced that she had been prevented from reproducing by being forced to wear an IUD under the terms of her father’s now-defunct conservatorship.
“I want to be able to get married and have a baby,” Spears said in courtroom testimony. “I was told right now in the conservatorship, I’m not able to get married or have a baby, I have a (IUD) inside of myself right now so I don’t get pregnant. I wanted to take the (IUD) out so I could start trying to have another baby. But this so-called team won’t let me go to the doctor to take it out because they don’t want me to have children — any more children.”
The Catholic Church prohibits the use of birth control and allows couples only to use Natural Family Planning (NFP). As Virginia Aabram wrote in National Catholic Register (NRC), the pop singer’s story echoed some of the warnings issued by Pope Paul VI in his encyclical Humanae Vitae.
“In addition to the greed that possibly undermines her whole situation, there’s also a whiff of eugenics,” noted Aabram. “Spears’ case isn’t the first time in the United States someone judged to be mentally unwell was stopped from having children. Her situation reflects that of the 70,000 Americans who were forcibly sterilized following the 1927 Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell.”