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The St. Petersburg Times on Michael and Jodi's wedding

Schiavo weds in private service

The ceremony at a Catholic church was very emotional, a relative says. The couple's two children attend.

By CURTIS KRUEGER, Times Staff Writer
Published January 22, 2006

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.

http://www.sptimes.com/2006/01/22/Tampabay/Schiavo_weds_in_priva.shtml