R
revert_jen
Guest
You cannot take communion if you are in a marriage that is not blessed by the Church. You cannot have your marriage blessed if you are currently married to someone else. In the eyes of the Church, marriages are “innocent until proven guilty,” which is to say that they are valid until they are proven otherwise. In any case, of course the priest should not have been cruel. Perhaps he didn’t mean to be cruel but to wake you up to what you need to do to return to the practice of the sacraments. Or maybe he did mean to be cruel. Priests need to go to Confession, too.
That said, if you have the intention of raising your child in the Catholic faith, I don’t see that the status of your marriage would prevent your child from being baptized. OTOH, if you are not willing to follow the Church’s teachings about marriage, I can see why the priest is not sure that you intend to raise your child as a Catholic.
It’s not right that you have stopped going to church, for sure! Attendance at Mass is not about feelings. Attendance at Mass is about worshipping God, participating in the Eucharistic Sacrifice (even if you are not eligible to receive the Eucharist, you participate by praying the prayers, etc.), being part of the visible Christian community, and incidentally being obedient. Uplift and feeling good are sometimes nice side effects, but they are not what Mass is about, and their absence is not a reason for not going. If there is no other Catholic church within a reasonable drive, you need to go to Mass at your own parish, even with that priest. You can offer up the suffering for the holy souls in Purgatory or for the lives of the threatened unborn, or for whatever else seems good to you.
I’m afraid Father is correct here. If you were originally married in the Catholic Church, then you are still married, as far as you or anyone knows. I feel very bad for the suffering you endured, but that doesn’t automatically make your marriage invalid. It may provide reasonable grounds to expect that the annulment will be granted, but that is a different matter. In any case, you are not “paying to have your marriage erased,” but defraying the costs of an investigation into whether you were ever really married. There is never a guarantee that an annulment will be granted. Your age when you were married makes it much more likely to be granted, however.
I think even you must know that you are not being denied the Eucharist because your husband beat you. You cut yourself off from the sacraments when you remarried, not when you divorced. The proper time to look into this was before you remarried, and if you didn’t know that, your pre-cana classes were lacking. You certainly would have been told about it if you had approached a priest and asked him to perform the second marriage. It sounds like you were told this, but that you decided it wasn’t necessary to follow the Church’s laws on this matter.
The check is to cover some of the costs of investigating the facts of your marriage, and if it represents a hardship it can be waived. You can see that you can’t just go to the marriage tribunal and say “thus-and-such happened in my marriage so it wasn’t valid.” They have to make sure what you say is true. They have to try to contact your husband if possible, and give him a chance to tell his side of the story (not that I can imagine it making any sort of difference in this case). But the annulment process is what it is–they can’t make a special process for each different situation.
Looking back over this post, I can see that I sound cold and unfeeling. I’m sorry about that. In fact, it breaks my heart that you had to go through so much pain and fear, and the loss of your child which is a pain I can’t even begin to imagine. I pray that you have been completely healed, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and that if you aren’t yet, you will be soon.
But if I let my sorrow at your situation cause me to give you bad advice, I am not helping you. Father is wrong to be cold, but priests are human. You asked him what to do, but then refused to listen to what he said. If he doesn’t know the circumstances of your first marriage, he can’t take them into account. If he does, then his attitude is even more wrong, but what he is telling you is still true, regardless of his attitude. (You’re lucky it’s only $150 in fact, in my diocese, it’s $500.)
It’s not about rules, it’s about what is. The Church cannot in conscience agree to marry you to someone if she doesn’t know whether you are already married. She can’t let you “eat and drink judgement on yourself” by taking Communion while you are living with someone to whom you aren’t married. Since you are Catholic, and you were not married in the Church (or with a dispensation) the second time, you can’t be surprised that the Church doesn’t see you as being married to your current (in the eyes of civil law) husband.
Apply for the annulment. Go straight to the diocese, if you don’t feel comfortable dealing with the priest at your parish. That is your next step.
As for your children, if it really worries you, I would consider having them baptised in a Protestant church. You could check the relevant parts of the Catechism about how it nees to be done to be valid. I’m sure any baptism at an Episcopalian, Lutheran, or Methodist church would be valid, as long as they don’t go in for weird feminist “In the name of the Creator, and the Redeemer…” stuff.
May God bless you,
–Jen