You might be right, but that is just toooo convenient.
We can dispute the extent to which people should be protected from themselves, but a promise you can’t deliver you can’t validly make. If you are not consenting but forced, your promise isn’t valid. If you are defrauded, neither.
But believe me, I do have problems with some verdicts.
Then she must neither validate marriages, but only enable them when the priest say, “I now pronounce you man and wife.”
Convalidation has the same effect as a new ceremony, it just isn’t done in public but discreetly. Conditional convalidation is a different story and it’s done in case something had been wrong when there is doubt.
As far as the civil marriages, though, I still don’t understand why it has to be declared null. Does the Church ever recognize a civil marriage as valid, and if so then what they do before their wedding is blessed cannot be called fornication, right?
If you are Catholic, you have observe the canonical form or be dispensed, or the marriage isn’t valid. But Protestants are treated as if they had been given all dispensations possible, so civil marriages are valid and sacramental for them, while for Catholics they aren’t even valid. It shouldn’t be called fornication if you think you’re married to someone and aren’t at fault for being wrong on this. Doesn’t make the marriage any more valid, though.
And let me point one thing out again: The Church doesn’t need to recognise a marriage as valid before declaring it null. The Church doesn’t annul or cancel real marriages. She only declares that there has never been any marriage in place. For Catholics, it’s crucial to determine if there had been a dispensation or not (you can be allowed to marry validly and sacramentally in a civil ceremony), if the persons hadn’t been impeded from obtaining a priest or deacon, if neither of them had formally left the Catholic Church (and merely joining a foreign cult isn’t enough).
That’s another thing I want to know. Jesus specifically allowed divorce in the case of marital infidelity. Why doesn’t the Church?
What Jesus said was that if you put away your wife and she commits adultery, the sin is on you. Unless you put her away for sin. Then her adultery is not on you. But there’s still adultery, so she’s still married to you. As we don’t have polygamy in the RCC, you’re stuck with that woman. Next, the word “porneia” used there can mean unlawful union, marriage not valid in the eyes of the law. Putting away a common law wife (concubine) is hardly divorce.
An annulment does not mean a marriage did not exist, only that it was not sacramental.
Grammatically, you are right. But the problem is that there is no “annulment” in the RCC. The Church doesn’t annul marriages. She only finds them invalid from the beginning if they are.
Finds, not
makes. Marriages which aren’t sacramental can be dissolved, but it’s not legally the same as the declaration of nullity of unsuccessfully attempted sacramental marriage.
To all those quibbling about whether one is sinning by having marital relations when one is unsure about the validity of their marriage, and one person mentioned something about while waiting for the “verdict”, here is an important point:
MARRIED people do not apply for decrees of nullity. A prerequisite to a tribunal investigation into a marriage is a DIVORCE.
Wrong. Your capitalisation suggests that you attribute more importance to civil court verdicts than church verdicts. Civilly divorced Catholics are still married in the eyes of the Church. So only married people can apply for a nullity decree. The fact that they are civilly divorced only means that the marital day by day functionning didn’t work out for them.
Next, civil divorce is not a prerequisite for a tribunal investigation. In fact, sometimes a nullity verdict comes faster than laggy civil divorce proceedings. Sometimes, in a civil jurisdiction, obtaining divorce for such a marriage may even be impossible. I’ve come across such cases during the canon law seminar which was a part of my legal studies.
In some cases, Church tribunals proceed ex officio. From their own initiative. This is when the impediment can’t be dispensed. If the civil jurisdiction doesn’t recognise that impediment as the grounds for divorce or annulment/nulity ruling, then you have a marriage declared null by the Church but upheld by the state.
