Dear Nebula,
First of all, great news on the validity! I’m sure that’s a big relief. Even though it’s no longer a “live” issue, I thought I might offer a few more tidbits to help you understand the rationale behind the laws that have been so vexing for you recently.
From what I understand on the issue reading around-- and at this point this is more out of interest over this legal case than anything else-- that the whole thing will hinge on if my joining the Mormon church formally will count as a renounciation of my Catholic faith into which I was baptized but not at all educated in. If it does, I think the marriage will be valid. There’s where I place my bet…
Obviously the diocese will have told you
why your marriage is valid, and formal enrolment in the Mormon church is probably the reason (part of the requirement for written notification of one’s bishop when one defects from the faith is that most other churches do not have any formal process of entry - you can just show up and go to church there). One other possibility that occurs to me, though, is that if you were essentially pulled out of the faith before being able to make the decision for yourself then a tribunal might also consider that formal defection. Parents can make those decisions for their young children such that, for instance, when they convert to Catholicism they can “convert” their baptized children simply by declaring their intent that the children be considered Catholics, too. It should work in the other direction, too.
Obviously this matter has to factor into my decision for no other reason than I would question the validity of a church which questions the validity of a marriage between two people who were virgins on their wedding day.
The real reason I wanted to post, though, is to throw some light on this difficulty you have been having, namely with the idea that no church worthy of the name should be doubting what appear to be perfectly valid commitments on the part of people who intended to marry. I hope to explain just a little bit as to
why the Catholic Church considers many of those marriages to be invalid.
The main flow of the reasoning is that the Church says: if a Catholic declines/refuses to marry within the rules set down by the Church, are we really supposed to believe that the same Catholic intends to do what the Church teaches about marriage? The problem is that this gets rather odd when we are dealing not with Catholics
per se but with former Catholics.
The requirement to observe Catholic form in marriage is really designed for Catholics as such, ideally *practicing Catholics *but at least those who self-identify as Catholics; if they say with their mouths that they want to get married, but then either don’t bother to find out how they as Catholics ought to do this, or even worse find out and then openly refuse to do those things, then that seems like a very acceptable reason to doubt that they intend to contract a (Catholic) marriage.
The requirement about formal defection, on the other hand, exists because Catholic identity operates on a spectrum of registers. In one sense, once one is baptized Catholic or is received into the Church, one is Catholic forever, unto all eternity. It’s an ontological fact, which admits only of the question of being a “good Catholic” or “bad Catholic.” But one can also lump some of the bad Catholics into a group of people who no longer believe or practice the Catholic faith at all and in fact believe and practice (sometimes quite fervently) a different faith. Formal defection was placed into our laws to prevent that sort of people from coming to a troubled point in their marriages contracted once having left the Church andsaying “Well, since I was Catholic twenty years ago and didn’t marry you in the Church 10 years ago, I can walk away at any time.” It was an attempt to seriously
bind people to marriages contracted while they were not living as Catholics by making it possibly to assert the
validity of those marriages.
The problem we have run into, though, is that the vagaries of interpretation have led to a very odd mixture of the above principles by setting the bar for defection so high that it effectively invalidates the marriages defection was meant to cement in their validity. It’s a problem that many have highlighted and hope will be remedied ASAP, but the fact of that problem should not cover up the main reasoning behind the invalidity issue to begin with, i.e. we’re really just looking to see if someone actually intends to enter into marriage (a lifelong union of man and woman that is exclusive, permanent, open to life, etc., etc.) rather than just entering into a somewhat temporary tax shelter, a more formal means of shacking up, or some similar non-marriage pact. We haven’t quite perfected our calculus in this regard, but that’s really all we’re trying to do.
. Thanks for responding and giving me your opinion in the first place.