Bringing Back Difficulty to get an Annulment

[Pug]

Thanks for all the food for thought.

Thanks for that. I was worrying, as you no doubt could see.

We’re not bound to continually question the outcome and make ourselves ill over it.

So very true! That is like the opposite of what is desirable.

 

[Joab_Anias]

If a person is waiting for an annulment, but it hasn’t come yet, they are still *able *to actually marry.

Civily yes but not re-marriage in the Church. The Church doesn’t recognize secular authority to divorce. One must recieve that approval before attempting to contract a new marriage

if it is the case that their previous marriage was invalid. They would just be contracting it illegally. It will be valid, though, and won’t need to be convalidated at some later date.

If contracted civiliy it would need to be convalidated. If they were to come back to the Church after contracting a civil marriage and after recieving an annulment then it could be convalidated under the proper guidance and after the guidlines were met.

This method of circumventing ones faith that you discribe hardly assures the contraction of a true marriage though and could underly issues that they actually aren’t doing so. To do so would put them no further ahead for having suffered through divorce already.

Hey, sorry for all these quotes.

No problem. I like them. They show how complex the issue is and the extreme depth of discernment a tribunal is faced with sorting out. It points to the title of this thread actually being a farce and the result of the increased recognition of invalid marriages. Not any fault of the process or the Church.

Peace.

 

[Pug]

This method of circumventing ones faith that you discribe hardly assures the contraction of a true marriage though and could underly issues that they actually aren’t doing so. To do so would put them no further ahead for having suffered through divorce already.

Ah. I actually wasn’t thinking of a circumventing kind of case. Perhaps the best way to explain is to point to a post on Jimmy Akin’s blog. He describes this case:

Sometimes we get people who say, “Well, our priest said that we didn’t need an annulment because we were married outside the Church, and he went ahead and married us anyway. Does that mean our current marriage is invalid?”

As you see, it is a retrospective kind of thing. They just did as they were told at the time, and now they wonder what to do at this current point, now that they know more facts than they did back then and they realize they ought to have applied for an annulment first. Here is the full blog entry.

He is talking about something like the case of if a couple goes to a priest to get married in the Church. They tell the priest that one of them had been married before, but in a courthouse, and that person was a baptized Catholic at the time, so they had been bound to marry in correct form, but they didn’t do it. The priest then erroneously tells the couple that they are free to marry and proceeds to marry them (without applying for the defect of form annulment). Many years later, they come for advice to someone, because now they are worried that they are in an invalid marriage because the priest had told them they didn’t need an annulment.

I agree with you about the complexity of the issue.

 

[Joab_Anias]

As you see, it is a retrospective kind of thing. They just did as they were told at the time, and now they wonder what to do at this current point, now that they know more facts than they did back then and they realize they ought to have applied for an annulment first. Here is the full blog entry.

That is a sticky wicket. In such a case I could see how, if the declaration of lack of canonical form were to be granted that the validity of the sacramental marriage wouldn’t then need to be convalidated. The lack of form annulment must indeed be applied for and I suspect the coupe would want to enter a period of joint prayerful chaste devotion to the Lord until they recieved an answer. Then my second thought would be, once clearance is recieved than whats the harm in renewing their vows for the sake of doubt.

Peace.

 

[CeiliseG]

I agree with NOBEERINHEAVEN—From what I hear it is pretty much filing the paperwork—going through the motions—and getting signed off. What a horrible feeling for people that are fighting for their marriage and really know that an anullment is wrong.
Prayers.

I am a new member and hope that I am using the forum correctly. I fought for my marriage. I prayed and prayed and prayed. I went through the annulment process ten years ago, after being “married” for 20 years. I had to fill out forms, yes. I had to answer 4 questions. The fourth one “Describe your marriage” took me two years to answer. I could not write more than a bit at a time as I tried to describe the mental, emotional, and spiritual agony, and the crushing loneliness that was my marriage.

Unlike my divorce, an adversarial procedure, the annulment was a healing process. An annulment isn’t granted to a “deserving” person. My pastor explained that it is a process designed to discern whether these two people were capable of loving each other as Christ loves his church.

I was not an angry, abusive, alcoholic like my husband. I was not deliberately hurtful as he was. But I had to take a long hard look at myself and what I brought to the marriage; my maturity (or lack of), my background, my reasons for marrying, my fear of standing up to him, etc. This has been very valuable to me.

I was raised to believe that marriage was for life, that children should not be raised in a broken home. This provided me with an excuse not to leave. I was afraid to stay and afraid to leave.

I was also raised to believe that children were a gift and an enormous responsibility from God, entrusted to the parents for a brief time. I will live with the guilt caused by my cowardice in not leaving for the rest of my life. Staying in my “marriage”, a grotesque mockery of everything God intended marriage to be, caused great emotional damage to my children, those precious gifts entrusted to me by God. The one least damaged is my youngest, who spent most of her childhood in a “broken” home.

Annulment is not easy. Please don’t for one second assume that it is, ever.
Thank you.

 

[RWMorris]

I am a new member and hope that I am using the forum correctly…yes. I had to answer 4 questions. The fourth one “Describe your marriage” took me two years to answer…Annulment is not easy. Please don’t for one second assume that it is, ever.
Thank you.

Thank you, Ceilise for a great post.
Just starting the annulment process can be very painful. I did not want to do it; not in a million years. I was married 12 years to my first wife, now 21 years to my second. When I first converted, I refused to ask for an annulment. I wanted to just be a Christian and go to Mass. I figured I would just skip communion. I don’t know if it is impossible to be a Catholic Christian and not receive communion, but it is awfully hard. I could feel the Holy Spirit tugging at my heart, pulling, pleading for the Body and Blood of our Savior. Plus my wife wasn’t exactly pleased with the situation.
My annulment process took almost a year; seemed like forever. I prayed a lot, “God’s Will be done.”
My wife and I are now happily married Catholic Christians. Our first anniversary is rapidly approaching. Now, I pray a lot of, “Thank you Jesus for your forgiveness and the Holy Spirit’s gifts of Love, Hope, and Charity.”

 

[Joab_Anias]

Considering the significant financial and emotional costs of submitting to the Rota, it’s my guess that only the strongest cases are sent for review. So 90% sounds reasonable to me, and does not prove that the US Tribunals are doing anything incorrectly.

On the contrary I think it proves they are doing just right.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I appreciated reading Cecelia 97’s post.

Some years back, I was teaching a CCD class. One young man whose faher had divorced, and was in the annulment process, but who made him go to CCD just the same, was very stormy looking when we started talking about divorce and remarriage. He jumped in and began criticizing the Church for “holding” people in a “bad” marriage; having all those “rules”, etc. Since I knew his faher was divorced, I figured I was in for a tough discussion.

Quite to my surprise (I had not thought about it in this way before) I found myself telling him he needed to realize that the “rules” were given to us by Christ to “let us off the hook” of our own bad decisions. That the annulment process existed was one of those. If we were held to perfection, not one of us would make it to heaven, not one. Jesus gave the Church power to “let us off” in His name. And, that’s what the Church’s annulment process is.

I have heard of “easy” annulments, and I suppose there are some. I have also heard there is nothing easy about it, in the main, and I believe that too. But I don’t think it’s a matter of “deserving” it or not. It’s a matter of the method the Church has adopted to give relief from errrors we have made. It could be easier or harder than it is right now. But it’s the method the Church has adopted, and it has Christ’s power behind it.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Oops! Didn’t finish. Anyway, the young man calmed down almost immediately and was one of the most attentive attendees after that. Never again did he complain about Church “rules”; something young people do quite a bit. It took a long time, but his father did get his annulment and remarried.

 

[otjm]

There is a phrase in law: “Hard cases make bad law”. That may take some a bit of time to puzzle out, but it is well worth dwelling on.

There has been a great deal said, partticularly elsewhere, of how bad the annulment process is (anyone can get it), how little it upholds the Sacrament of Marriage (no one has pointed to the Kennedy case yet, and I am surprised), and any other of a number of objections.

But lets, just for the sake of looking at things from a fresh prospective, look at a couple of numbers.

There are an estimated 8,000,000 (eight million) divorced Catholics, and the numbers do not show any signs of going down.

In one year, there might be 60,000 (sixty thousand) decrees of nullity.

Part of them are for lack of form - in short, a Catholic gets married in front of someone other than a priest - a JP, a judge, or a minister of another faith. Those are slam-dunks. It is not an issue of judgement made by a tribunal; they are not stretching any law or misinterpreting any facts, or giving a “Catholic divorce” as the whole issue is a simple factual one, with no interpretation required.

Next are the Protestants who were married to someone and then divorced, and either want to marry a Catholic, or already have, and want the second marriage to be sacramental, so they go through the tirbunal process to sort things out. They aren’t even Catholic, and may never have ahd the understanding that marriage is permanent (one of the requirements for a sacramental marriage).

That may leAve us with 35 to 40,000 Catholics looking to resolve a marriage issue. Let’s go with 40,000.

That means tht about one half of one percent of all divorced Catholics are being granted a decree of nullity.

And we say too many are being granted?

 

[HenryV]

According to Canon Law knowledge of the ends and purpose of marriage is assumed at puberty (not just for Catholics).

 

[otjm]

According to Canon Law knowledge of the ends and purpose of marriage is assumed at puberty (not just for Catholics).

And according to Canon law, that can be overcome by the evidence. Canon Law does not reflect what society teaches, and currently society, which is by and large very incluenced by secualrism, as well as a number of other issues, is going through a process of redefining marriage.

About the only holdouts are those of faith, and amongst those, there is more questioning than one would suppose.

 

[Geremia]

I’ve even seen a parish website where annulment was listed under “Sacraments,” right next to marriage! It has virtually become an 8th sacrament; God have mercy on us all!

This is a good article:
The annulment crisis in the Church
By Fr. Leonard Kennedy

Here is an edifying quote from it pertaining to the immense scale of the marriage crisis in the U.S.:

The United States has 6% of the world’s Catholics but grants 78% percent of the world’s annulments. In 1968 the Church there granted fewer than 600 annulments; from 1984 to 1994 it granted just under 59,000 annually. But more than 90% of the cases which were appealed to the highest matrimonial court, the Roman Rota, were overturned.

I’ve heard that even one party can pursue an annulment without even the signature of that party’s spouse, as was the case for the author of the book on the annulments crisis that Fr. Kennedy reviews in his article.

 

[Friar_David_O.Carm]

First, why revive a thread from over 3 years ago?

Second, I think the great number of anullments in the United States shows how society has not prepared its members for what a true marriage is.

 

[Geremia]

First, why revive a thread from over 3 years ago?

Is that against forum etiquette? I found it via a Google search.

Second, I think the great number of anullments in the United States shows how society has not prepared its members for what a true marriage is.

How does the U.S. differ from other “1st world,” industrialized countries, though? I would say that it’s because the U.S. had contraception first. I predict we will see similar effects in other countries due to contraception, too. Yet the ecclesiastical courts in the U.S. are to blame, too, as Vasoli’s book shows.

 

[Friar_David_O.Carm]

Is that against forum etiquette? I found it via a Google search.

It normally is. If a thread is a couple of years old one should start a new thread rather then resurrecting the old one.

But…

How does the U.S. differ from other “1st world,” industrialized countries, though? I would say that it’s because the U.S. had contraception first. I predict we will see similar effects in other countries due to contraception, too. Yet the ecclesiastical courts in the U.S. are to blame, too, as Vasoli’s book shows.

How do the statistics of other “1st world” countries anullments compare to those in the US?

 

[Nostradennis]

A marriage annulment in reality is nothing more than a Catholic divorce. Officially, a marriage annulment is not a dissolution of an existing marriage, but rather a determination that a marriage was not entered into validly. You were never married to begin with.

 

[Friar_David_O.Carm]

A marriage annulment in reality is nothing more than a Catholic divorce. Officially, a marriage annulment is not a dissolution of an existing marriage, but rather a determination that a marriage was not entered into validly. You were never married to begin with.

Then technically it is not a Catholic divorce because a divorce is the dissolution of something that exists, mainly a civil marriage. If there was no valid sacramental marriage to begin with then there is nothing dissolve.

 

[anonymous_in_fl]

Might the percentage indicate other things? Such as: 1) the better access to forms, paperwork, parish records, etc, that are needed for an annulment? I just think about other predominately Catholic countries (like Haiti) where access to the neccessary documents to procure an annulment are nearly destroyed or non-existent. That would definitely impede the entire process altogether.

And 2) Might this indicate that Catholics seeking an annulment want to acutally follow the Church’s teaching and “set things aright” by trying for an annulment? Maybe lower percentages indicate a “laissez faire” attitude toward trying to follow the Church’s teaching on subsequent marriages? Might these folks just “forget” the Church and go to another denomination where annulments are not necessary?

I don’t know - - - I am not a theologian; just kinda thinking out loud.

 

[Nostradennis]

If there was no valid sacramental marriage to begin with then there is nothing dissolve.

Then maybe the requirements for engagement should be upgraded. Hard to believe that no one knows how a Catholic marriage works today so the assumption is always made that it must be invalid. I thought validity always rests with the sacrament until proven otherwise? It seems like there has been a shift or reversal of validity when it come to marriage. Maybe the real question is has anybody ever been denied an annulment recently?