I don’t think anybody leaves the Church and marries thinking, “Sweet! If I want to go back to the Church, my marriage won’t be recognized, so I have a freebie on divorce!” No, I don’t think people do that. What sane person presumes that they need to be in the Church in order to be “right with God” and yet lives outside the Church with the idea that they can come back any time they like and don’t have to be concerned that the Almighty will of course care that this person cyncially used someone else in a marriage they knew suffered from lack of the intention to remain faithful for life? No, God will not be mocked. Someone would have to be a bit crazy or deluded to think that way.
No, that’s not what I meant. I don’t think anybody would have that sort of mindset. I think it would go something like this: Someone leaves the Church and starts attending, say, a Lutheran or Baptist church. They become convinced that they are doing the right thing, or that God doesn’t care what church they go to as long as it is “Christian”, or they just don’t care what church they go to, they just do it for social reasons or to please a spouse. They get married in that church. Obviously people in that church don’t give two hoots for what Catholics think of a fallen-away Catholic getting married in their church, nor whether Catholics think it is “valid” or not.
Then the fallen-away Catholic gets to thinking — maybe they feel drawn to watch EWTN or something, and they hear something that pricks at their conscience. They doubt that they are “right with God” and the doubt won’t go away. Finally they take the plunge — “I’m going to go to a priest and straighten this all out”. They realize that this will mean breaking with their newfound church, but they don’t care. Good for them.
But then there is the small matter of the spouse. The spouse doesn’t want to convalidate the marriage in the Catholic Church, and in fact wants to remain in their present church, and makes life very difficult for the Catholic spouse. The Catholic spouse is at a crossroads — either they can go for a
sanatio in radice and continue to stay with the non-Catholic spouse, or they can say “you know what, my leaving the Church, and taking up with this person, was displeasing to Almighty God in the first place, I’m going to pack my bags, accept the difficulties of divorce as my temporal punishment for having betrayed Our Lord, and start anew — and maybe even find a Catholic spouse who will help me save my soul”. Admittedly this becomes more difficult if children are involved. But my point should be clear. Under the 1983 CIC which made allowance for “leaving the Church by a formal act”, the Catholic is stuck in a valid marriage, and annulment might not be possible. Under Benedict’s revision to the 1983 CIC, they’re home free. They can either convalidate their marriage or not. But what they
cannot do is continue to live in an invalid marriage. Time either to fish or to cut bait, as the saying goes.
