I would, of course you have to be aware of the economic implications that this situation brings. You must be aware that it is a package deal. You marry the person with kids and everything.
I married a divorced and protestant woman, this divorced woman has two kids of her own. One blessed day she decided to baptize our little girl. I jump out of my seat because I was sort of praying for it, because I was feeling the need to return to the church.
I told her no, I don’t want any kind of problems with your father. She said that is going to be my fathers day gift for you.
June 20, 2004. We had to fight for that blessing since the local priest would not baptize the child for us being mixed religion and Living in Sin. Finally he agreed to do it only if somebody vouched for the God Parents stating they were catholic.
Well we started going to the church. She of course was like any fundamentalist questioning everything that was done on the Mass.
A month later she started taking cathechism class, withoiut telling me a thing. She would come and ask these kind of questions that are normal stuff for us. Like what says the scripture about Mary and so. I would have to study to answer back to her.
One year after, she noticed that during consacration something else was happening. Note that we know this things, but most of the time this are revealed to protestant persons that are looking for God in The Church.
She noticed that what happened at the Calvary is what happens at the altar during consacration of the species.
She was so impressed by what was revealed to her that she wanted to take part on it.
We talked to the local priest again and he said that he would convalidate our marriage, but there was a problem she was divorced from another pentecostal man who was Catholic once but baptized in the pentecostal church. Only because he was baptized on that church their marriage was valid to the Catholic Church and it was a sacrament.
I was outraged because if we believe in only one baptism Ef 4, 5. How could that second repetitive pentecostal baptism be representative of a formal defection from the Church. This was a misinterpretation of the law. Beside she was called by Christ to join his body.
Everybody even the Bishop, told us to pray to God that soon we would find a solution. I told her you must be strong and ask for a nullment decision. She did not want that, because there was to many protestant people involved and she did not wanted to bother them. Every sunday at mass I would ask god for a solution before the Holy Eucarist and to give her courage to start the nullment process. She would pray for another solution, something like for Rome to see the Canon law 1087 in another way just like I had interpret it.
Every sunday we pray to Christ for the solution. We baptized her oldest daughter. Not the boy yet. We had been going to the Church every sunday for almost two and a half years.
Now, on December 6, 2006 day of Saint Nicholas, the real St. Nick. We received a phone call from the Godfather of the oldest girl, he is on the seminar studying canon law. He told my wife that there was a new interpretation to the Formal act of defection. He sent the copies to us, we received them, read and were so Happy. It was unbelievable, imagine the odds of Rome changing anything, specially something that has being like that since 1983, 24 years.
For us this is a miracle of the Holy Eucharist Sacrament.
The letter says in brief that for you to be considered a Formal defector from the church there are three conditions:
- You must make the internal descision to defect.
- You must turn into a notorious defector practicing another religion or cult or chirstian cult. (The second baptism covers that.)
- You must put it in writing so the Parrish can anotate into the baptism record that you are a defector.(This is the formal defection from Church)
Guess what nobody does that in Latin America, of course out of ingnorance, but it was the door that my wife was adking for so we could get married in the Church, with out bugging anybody in the families.
So since my wife was married to a Catholic baptized person who did not contracted matrimony following the canonical form and was not a formal defector, her previous marriage was declared null for lack of canonical form.
To end the story, she made all the sacraments and we got married aleluya! on February 24, 2007. We are very happy, when she made her first communion she had the vision again she saw Christ dying on the cross saying, It’s all done. I was waiting for you. She got scared and she open her eyes.
If I don’t tell you that satan is pi…, I would be lying to you because he lost two souls that saturday had try to ruin everything since that day, but love can win against all odds and we really love each other.
We must keep praying and going to Mass to keep our marriage Holy.
We were blessed by God due to our prayer and the prayers of all the Family. This is a free gift that god made us and we did not deserve it.
And yes, of that you can be sure - if someone is at enough fault to warrant this, the tribunal has and will use the power to prohibit him from marriage without prior consent of the ordinary (bishop).
