Depends on her diocese. Civil divorce is not a requirement of canon law. I actually think dioceses should not require a civil divorce because if people’s marriage is valid canonically, they shouldn’t divorce civilly and the break of the marriage has nothing to do with validity or sacramentality (apart from maybe supplying some evidence of a tendency possibly dating back to the moment of contraction of marriage). I would normally expect civil divorce to be deterred until nullity proceedings in the church Tribunal are finished. Of course, I may be wrong. The Tribunal doesn’t serve to examine a marriage: it serves to challenge it. And for those people who are not sure of validity but want to stay married, convalidation is there. So if they wanted to stay together for the sake of marriage, they would be convalidating, not suing for nullity.
Still, I can easily imagine an attitude like, “if this marriage is valid, I will serve it, but if it’s not, then I have no desire to convalidate it.” Civil divorce is a problem here.
Requiring a civil divorce basically makes the impression that the Church is waiting for the marriage to break apart and then she will come in with compassion and retroactively declare the marriage null and void and all so one can freely remarry. But one simply cannot forget that whatever happens after the exchange of vows has no bearing on validity. It may provide some evidence (the groom passing out, the bride confessing she’s pregnant with the best man, the psychiatrist showing up and protesting the marriage one hour too late etc) but it doesn’t affect validity. I don’t like the view of nullity as a medicine for broken marriage and for complicated marital situations. I am probably lacking compassion and lost on love and mercy, but I believe that the sacrament either is there or isn’t there and the Church has no power to impart the sacrament on an already married person. Let us stress once again that a nullity verdict is declarative: it does not change any reality. If someone lied, the evidence was faked, the judge was bribed, one is still married. Now canon 1066:
Can. 1066 Before a marriage is celebrated, it must be evident that nothing stands in the way of its valid and licit celebration.
Canon 1066 does not directly stand in the way of happy “annulments”, but looking at it should make any ecclesiastic judge think twice before overdoing the compassion part. He has
no power to break the bond. There is one power that can dissolve a valid and sacramental consummated marriage and the name of that power is death:
Can. 1141 A marriage that is ratum et consummatum can be dissolved by no human power and by no cause, except death.
Again, this canon does not directly stand in the way of happy “annulments”, but it should probably make some liberal judges bite their nails.
Basically, if they declare null a valid marriage, the recipient of the decree will objectively remain married to the first spouse and become married bigamously to the subsequent “spouse”. We can speculate about grace and everything, and surely the poor recipient is not responsible for the Tribunal judges’ error or deliberate act, but we cannot expect God to alter the sacramental reality to follow the decrees of Tribunals that don’t reflect it.
I’m talking about a marriage of two unbaptised people, which is not a Catholic sacramental marriage, so teachings of the Church regarding sacramental marriage do not apply (the so called “natural” marriage can be dissolved, although it should not be). Civil marriages are not valid for Catholics, although they are valid for non-Christians and even sacramental for baptised Christians who are not Catholic. Talking about “ending a marriage” is a bad analogy and nullity decrees do not serve to get people out of trouble as much as to strike down objectively invalid marriages. A marriage is invalid because it’s not validly contracted, which the Tribunal only discovers, not because the Tribunal “erases the record” and says you were never married. You’re basically confusing sacramental and non-sacramental marriages, or picking the wrong person to quote. I don’t have questions, either, in addition to us two talking about two different things, so you probably meant to address someone else.