Ashley Biden Is Married

Ashley Biden and Howard Krein

Joy Moody

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In the same Delaware church where she was baptized, Ashley Biden, the Vice President’s daughter, was married Saturday to Philadelphia surgeon Howard Krein.

The couple were wed at the steepled St. Joseph on the Brandywine Roman Catholic Church, in Greenville, in a ceremony combining the bride’s Catholic traditions and the groom’s Jewish ones.

Afterward, the newlyweds and some 200 family and close friends headed to the Biden family’s lakeside family home in nearby Wilmington for a reception and dinner served family-style in the backyard, which was personally prepped for the big event by the Vice President. In recent weeks, Biden laid fresh sod and his wife, Jill, had planted special fast-growing vines up the latticework around the party tent.

Biden escorted the bride, who wore Vera Wang, down the aisle and had prepared to be emotional about giving away the youngest of his three children.

“I kept telling Ash, we’ve got to open up the church and practice walking up and down the aisle so I can handle it,” the vice president told PEOPLE in the days leading up to the wedding. He reminisced about the only other time he’d seen his daughter in a veil – at her First Communion. “I think to myself, aw, God, my little girl! This can’t have passed so quick.”

Krein, 45, will surprise his bride Biden, 30, on Saturday night with their honeymoon destination, a family source said. They will make their home in Philadelphia, “just 28 minutes away” from her parents, by the doting Vice President’s estimation.

Krein and Biden, a Delaware state social worker who works with troubled children, have been a couple since the summer of 2010, after meeting through Beau Biden, one of her two older brothers. Krein is the son of Bunny Krein, a physician’s assistant in cardiology, and Stanley Krein, a retired insurance executive in Cherry Hill, N.J.

Krein proposed last October, at sunset on a cliff in Big Sur, Calif. – but not before getting “Pop’s” permission first, said the elder Biden. “This is the right guy,” the VP said. “And he’s getting a helluva woman.”