The first thing Veronica Meusel noticed when her boyfriend arrived to accompany her to Mass at Sacred Heart of Mary in Graceland Park was his closed-toe shoes. Why wasn’t he wearing his usual flip-flops, she wondered?
Brandon Holthaus thought his plans for a surprise engagement proposal at the end of a Saturday Mass last fall were foiled. But then his girlfriend suggested they go out for crab cakes afterward and he breathed easier.
“She has no idea,” Holthaus remembers thinking Sept. 21, before he got down on one knee in front of the congregation and proposed to Meusel before the end of Mass.
“I was expecting it at some point, but I didn’t know when,” Meusel said. “It was very exciting.”
Meusel grew up at Sacred Heart of Mary, with her family regularly attending Saturday evening Masses. Redemptorist Father Jim Szoboyna, former pastor of Sacred Heart of Mary, was open to the proposal idea, Holthaus said, and the two worked together on the details on how to make it happen.
“It was a great idea,” Father Szoboyna said. “She was so committed to the parish and her parents were very involved. He knew that it was so important to her.”
Father Szoboyna planned a special blessing on the day and had just taken the holy water from Meusel, who was a lector, when Holthaus approached the altar at the end of Mass.
“He wanted to mic me up because people would be confused,” Holthaus said, who declined the mic so only Meusel could hear his words. “When I did go down on one knee, people went, ‘Ooooh.’ ”
“That’s when I blacked out. I don’t remember anything else,” Meusel said. “It was hot, and my hair was in a ponytail. The only thought I had was (that) my hair looks terrible.”
Holthaus had considered other places to propose, from concert halls to the beach, but it felt “more about myself, not us.”
“I thought about it awhile and thought it was a perfect thing to do,” Holthaus said.
The couple first met in college at Stevenson University in Owings Mills but didn’t reconnect until 2020 during the pandemic, according to Holthaus, who lives in Baltimore and was a parishioner of Church of the Annunciation in Rosedale.
“Our first date was at Fort McHenry outside because of COVID,” Holthaus said. “We had crabcakes there.”
Holthaus and Meusel are still making plans on where they will get married. They are grateful that the proposal took place at Sacred Heart of Mary, which has since united with Our Lady of Hope in Dundalk and St. Rita in Dundalk to form a new parish.
“A woman (at Sacred Heart of Mary) said, ‘Thank you for letting us be a part of this special moment,’ ” Meusel said. “It’s amazing the support and the tremendous love we received. They were very excited for both of us.”
Email Katie V. Jones at kjones@CatholicReview.org
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