Steadfast:
Dude, what were you thinking on the whole divorce thing? There is no divorce in Catholicism. We like to give it different terms like anullments. Idealistically, there should be no anullments and the Church should do a better job at handing out marriages to whoever wants it.
I see so much literature as far as who shouldn’t recieve communion and see hardly nothing as far as who shouldn’t get married.
If Catholic literature were a meal at a restauraunt, I have just been served my appetizer. Better yet, it’s fancy restaurant and I have just been served the sherbet to cleanse my pallette. I can’t wait for dessert.
Stop the train, Ted Theodore Logan,
There is most certainly divorce in Catholicism. When a situation deteriorates to the point that there must be some legal separation of residence, property, and custody, a Catholic can divorce without doing any wrong. The situation itself is always unfortunate and, we might say, “objectively evil” (in its fallenness, being less than good), but need not involve moral culpability. Divorce is purely legal and has no effect on the “real” marital status of the spouses. The grave moral problem lies not in getting divorced but in pretending that once divorced one is free to “remarry.”
Furthermore, annulment is not a different name for divorce, but an entirely separate phenomenon. It speaks to the objective marital status of the couple. The term is misleading because the Church does not, in fact, annul marriages (which would disband an existing union) but declare them null (null and void from the get go, never having actually occurred).
On the broader point, though, you are right on in noticing that something is enormously wrong with the Catholic marriage structure at present, although I wouldn’t be willing to argue that we know for sure it’s
all on the end of who we’re letting get married under what circumstances (part of it may be with the tribunals fudging things after the fact).
