Catholic marrying a non catholic divorcee with children

[Slewis102]

My catholic girlfriend and I are madly in love and desperate to marry and live our lives together. The problem is I was married before and we had children. I have been advised I may have grounds for applying to the high court for nullity of marriage but is this enough for us to then be allowed to marry in a Catholic Church?

Essentially I will do anything. Any advice would be gratefully received

 

[1ke]

The Catholic Church recognizes and respects marriages of non-Catholics as valid. A person validly married to Person A cannot marry Person B. Divorce does not end a valid marriage, as Jesus taught us. Therefore, civil divorce does not free someone to marry another.

You can petition the Catholic Church to evaluate the facts surrounding your marriage to determine whether or not a valid marriage was entered into from the beginning. If so, then you are not free to marry anyone else until the death of your valid spouse. If not, then a decree of nullity would be issued and you are free to contract a marriage with another.

So, your first step is to make an appointment with a Catholic pastor to discuss all the details of your marriage, and he will guide you from there.

There are many factors such as baptismal status of both parties, whether or not either party had attempted marriage in the past, whether or not the other party was a Catholic, etc.

Because there are many variables that could impact the situation, we can only give general advice here. Bottom line, you must be declared free to marry before you can proceed to marry anyone else. If/Once you are declared free to marry, then the marriage preparation process can begin with your intended. There will be marriage prep and paperwork to be done.

So, make an appointment with her pastor and start from there.

 

[bsf]

I suggest you and your girlfriend request an appointment with her parish priest to discuss this issue.

 

[Miss_Felicity]

Welcome to CAF! Looks like you have stepped in a potential hornets nest as far as this question and you may get some strong answers, please do not take it personally and know people are very serious about their faith and issues of marriage and potentially of mixed faith marriages. If you use the search bar you will find many other threads that will give you greater insight into your situation with that said: You are correct that you will need to pursue an annulment. An annulment is not guaranteed so there is a possibility that you will apply for one and go through a process that could take anywhere from a few months to a few years (depending on what type of case) and still come up empty and not be allowed to marry in the Catholic Church. If your girlfriend is currently a practicing Catholic marrying in the Catholic church may be very important to her. Now IF you end up with a decree of nullity in hand you will still need to dispensation to marry because you are non Catholic. A lot of people will come in and fill in a lot gaps in what I’m telling you and thats good. I’m basically giving you the outline of what may very well be an uphill climb. How you and your girlfriend tackle that is up to the 2 of you.

 

[His_helpmeet]

To clarify a few questions that are common and that you may have:

1. An annulment (declaration of nullity) does NOT mean that the Church “makes the marriage as though it never happened”. Nor is it a “Catholic divorce”. The Church doesn’t actively DO anything to the marriage. I liken it to the principle of a court of law. A person is innocent until proven guilty. Just because he was FOUND guilty doesn’t mean he didn’t do the crime until they proved he did. They didn’t DO anything to him. Similarly, every marriage is considered valid until proven otherwise, with the exception of marriages that have a problem that you can prove on paper (e.g. being too closely related, being Catholic and marrying outside the Church without a dispensation, being too young, etc.). The marriages of baptized people, or those who become baptized after the marriage, are sacramental marriages. If one or both parties is not baptized, they have a natural marriage. Both are equally valid (except for the circumstances I have outlined above). The role of the marriage tribunal is to prove that something was fundamentally missing from the marriage covenant to begin with, that there were one or more reasons that a valid natural or sacramental marriage did not exist. Consequently this is not a “divorce” because the marriage does not “end”. A valid marriage can be ended only by death (or, if one or both parties is not baptized, by a decree from the bishop or the Pope in select circumstances). It’s a statement that the marriage covenant NEVER EXISTED.
2. As long as at least one party entered the marriage in good faith (this is called a putative marriage), the children are NOT illegitimate. The Church is NOT denying that there was a relationship or that you had a history together. What it IS saying is that, for one or more reasons, there was no valid marriage covenant as we understand marriage. You DID have a civil contract. You DID have a wedding. You DID have a family and a life together. But that life was fundamentally missing something that was necessary for a VALID marriage to exist.
3. There is a cost to procuring a declaration of nullity. In our area, it’s $900 Canadian but that can differ depending on where you live. People commonly feel that they’re being “ripped off” and that Catholics have this option where if you throw money at the Church they’ll make it like your marriage never happened. Let’s look at this objectively. In our area, the marriage tribunal hears approximately 220 cases a year and grants about 180 declarations of nullity. Now, you don’t pay the entire $900 up front. You pay $150 as a filing fee, and then you ONLY pay the balance IF you get an affirmative decision (i.e. marriage not valid) - they have to pay a certain amount of money to the appeals tribunal, as an affirmative finding means an automatic appeal to another tribunal to verify the decision. Coupling that with the fees for Petrine and Pauline privilege cases (where the Pope or the bishop, respectively, can dissolve a marriage in which one or both parties was not baptized, also respectively), we can probably guess that they make somewhere around $20,000 a year, and that may be a generous estimate as the fees are substantially less for Petrine and Pauline privilege cases. There are 7 people working in that office - two case instructors, a defender of the bond, an admin assistant, and three priest-judges. Consequently, they are making not even $3,000 per person per year - and that’s without sending ANY money to the appeals tribunal. This is NOT a money-spinner. If you can’t pay, they can talk to the parish and something can usually be worked out - people are not turned away just because they can’t afford to pay the fees.
4. No future marriage plans may be made until the case has been completed, which they attempt to do in a time frame of 18 months, although this is not a set deadline. Simple cases can proceed much more quickly.