Practice of Annulments? So confused, please help!

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Whitney

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Hey everyone! I’m over here trying to become Catholic and really loving the church! However… I’ve been very hung up on the issue of marriages and annulment. This doesn’t pertain to me on any personal level, but it is bothering me as a concept. My problem essentially is that on one hand, I listen to Rose Sweet (link below) tell a caller that marriage is not dissolvable, even if the spouse cheats, I would assume even if they are unrepentant. I think if the Catholic Church made a blanket statement and stuck to it, I could actually accept that. My problem is the seemingly arbitrary giving of annulments. A man I know was married, and 7 years into his marriage got divorced, around that time he stopped going to the Catholic Church because he was concerned about the “secret practices” of the knights of Columbus. Anyway their marriage was annulled because he isn’t practicing as a Catholic right now. He stated that almost everyone who applies for annulment was granted one. I have no way of vetting that, but looking at this list of reasons for annulment I can definitely see why. It would seem that if a couple gets married in Vegas and then lives 20 years together as husband and wife, practicing Catholics, and divorces because they are bored of each other they would be able to annul that marriage. But a couple who marries validly in the Catholic Church and 5 years into the marriage the husband becomes addicted to drugs and beats his wife and cheats on her the Catholic Church would say too bad. I would love your feedback! I am the first to admit I have little to no understanding on this topic and because it is so situationally dependant it’s hard to find any answers. Please help!


 
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Whitney said:
he stopped going to the Catholic Church because he was concerned about the “secret practices” of the knights of Columbus.
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They’re so secret that even I, as Grand Knight for my council, have never been told about them . . .

:roll_eyes:

That aside, annulment is about the time of the marriage; anything happening afterwards doesn’t affect the validity at that time. (However, there are a couple of rare cases in which the Pauline privilege, for example, allows divorce and remarriage).

The Orthodox take a more pastoral approach with “economia”, in which the permanence of marriage is acknowledged, but they also acknowledge that what has happened should not have. The second marriage is reluctantly permitted to the abandoned party.

Generally, any second marriage in Orthodoxy is not considered sacramental, and the joyful readings are replaced with penititial ones. There is hope that this grows into a sacramental marriage in time.

Note that this applies to any second marriage, including after death of the spouse.

A second marriage is usually permitted, a third is discretionary. Never, ever, a fourth; I believe an emperor was deposed for purporting to marry a fourth time.

hawk
 
Sacraments are real, not pretend. Those who attempt the sacrament of Holy Matrimony and achieve it are really bound by their sacramental vows and their effects. Marriage, however, is sometimes attempted, but not achieved. A tribunal merely makes a decision on the matter after examining sufficient evidence about the marriage in question. In fact, a tribunal dose not dissolve any marraige. It merely gives a decision as to whether a marriage is sacramental or not. As for adultery, it does not dissolve a marriage either. It merely harms the marriage. Adultery alone is not a ground for annulment. Yet, if one goes into marriage planning not to be faithful, it is doubtful how he could have meant his vows. In such a case, consent would be defective. This is a ground for annulment as the vows, if dishonest, were insufficient to achieve a sacramental state before God and His Church.
 
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Whitney said:
Anyway their marriage was annulled because he isn’t practicing as a Catholic right now.
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That may be what he told you, but that is not the reason. That is not the reason because that is not a even a ground for a petition for nullity.

I would suggest you get the book Annulment: The Wedding That Was by Michael Smith Foster. It does an excellent job of explaining what nullity is and isn’t.
Whitney said:
He stated that almost everyone who applies for annulment was granted one.
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Your formerly practicing Catholic conspiracy theorist friend really has no clue what he’s taking about.
 
OP, read the book that 1ke recommended .
 
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Whitney said:
But a couple who marries validly in the Catholic Church and 5 years into the marriage the husband becomes addicted to drugs and beats his wife and cheats on her the Catholic Church would say too bad.
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The obtaining of a decree of nullity is, in many cases, not a straightforward decision. Not everything fits neatly into preconceived concepts. Yes, there are what are know as diriment impediments to the confection of a sacramental and/or valid marriage. Such things as alcoholism, homosexuality, and several others automatically make a marriage null - it never happened - God did not join the two together. But there are situations that are grey areas. You cite spousal abuse and say that the Church says tough luck. I might suggest, not so fast. Christ said that “a man should love his wife like his own flesh. No man hates his own flesh” I believe that Pope St. John Paul II, while very concerned about the number and frequency of “annulments” in the U.S. did give an opinion that if physical spousal abuse arose in a marriage, even it it was not evident at the time of the marriage ceremony, that marriage may be determined to be null. The reasoning was not the abuse itself, but what was considered a gross psychological immaturity that rendered the abuser unable to make a free choice, and the aggrieved partner (the wife) has she known that in the future she would be subjected to physical abuse/harm would not have freely consented. The determination of such a finding is difficult at best given the nature of the tribunal action, and not every case results in the same outcome, but your statement about what the church would do categorically in this instance is off the mark.
The other posters who have recommended readings are spot on. I offer that it would be wise for you to do much more research on the topic before drawing a firm and final conviction that the “annulment” process is arbitrary.
Peace.
 
In CajunJoy’s post citing the Catholic Spirit article, the posts cuts off at citing the article saying "An annulment does not “undo”… . Read the article, the complete sentence says "An annulment does not “undo” the sacrament of marriage, but establishes that a sacrament never existed in the first place. In other words, “what God has joined together, no man may divide” - Jesus’ words - never happened. Nullity means that God did not join two people in the sacrament of matrimony. That is what the church states, and is based on Jesus’ words to Peter, “what ever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven, and whatever you hold bound shall be held bound.”
 
joeybaggz said:
“what God has joined together, no man may divide” - Jesus’ words - never happened. Nullity means that God did not join two people in the sacrament of matrimony.
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So if you’re married in a courthouse or Vegas, etc, and you’re Catholic, you’re living in a state of sin as if you’re husband and wife but truly are not until you are remarried in the church? And are excluded from the Eucharist?
 
Whitney said:
So if you’re married in a courthouse or Vegas, etc, and you’re Catholic, you’re living in a state of sin as if you’re husband and wife but truly are not until you are remarried in the church? And are excluded from the Eucharist?
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Yep. That’s right.
 
First, the term “annulments” in the Church is colloquial and is imprecise language.

The Church will review a marriage that has ended in civil divorce to determine if, at the wedding, a valid marriage was contracted. If the competent tribunal determines there was not a valid marriage, they issue a “Decree of Nullity”.

To dissolve a valid marriage is a different thing, it can only happen in very specific occasions (marriage was unconsummated, the Pauline or Peterine privilege).
 
1ke said:
Yep. That’s right.
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That makes a little more sense, I’m otherwise thinking everyone would be married in a garden without clergy just in case their marriage didn’t work out.

I still find it hard when I imagine, for an example, two women who were both non-Catholic, marrying young, getting divorced then remarrying and having children. Then both learn the truth of Catholicism and would like to join the church, one was married initially a civil ceremony and the other in her parents church. One welcomed into the church and one told she would first need to leave her husband with whom she has young children in order to join. Both vowed to stay with their initial spouse until death (I presume that this is stated in the civil ceremony). It just seems like a loophole that some benefit from, while others are condemned.
 
Let’s ignore marriage, Catholicism, etc. for a minute.

Let’s talk about contracts! The law says that contracts are binding, that you can’t get out of a contract you signed without penalty. Terrific, right? Just like a Catholic marriage!

But wait…what if you were coerced into signing the contract? What if the other party promised to do certain things in the contract and never followed through? What if the other party said things in the contract that weren’t true (like, “Our company has 20 years experience building bridges in the developing world,” and they had never built any bridges at all)? What if the other party entered into the contract with no intent to fulfill their part?

So are contracts legally binding? ALL of them, ALL the time? Of course not. They can be nullified under certain circumstance. Just like a Catholic marriage–which is, after all, a contract.

A Catholic marriage has certain features (free consent, ability to marry within the church, openness to having children, no intent to divorce later, etc.–others here have given references to them). If one of these features is missing, there IS NO MARRIAGE.

So both statements are true: A Catholic marriage cannot be annulled. But you can annul something that was not really a Catholic marriage.

And then we go off into more debatable areas. Take your example of a husband who becomes addicted to drugs, beats his wife, and commits adultery. Would the Catholic Church say “Too bad”? It’s up to the tribunal. You can appeal. And if they still say “No,” then it’s up to your individual conscience. Ultimately, every moral decision is a decision of your own conscience. (I’m leaving off footnotes here–well formed conscience, various steps, etc. etc. but I’m also using the word “ultimately”. Augustine would agree.) So the tribunal turns you down. But after a reasonable amount of study and thought, you decide there was no marriage. Can you re-marry? Perhaps not with a Catholic wedding. But if your conscience truly tells you that you can, you can.

Joeybaggz gave an excellent answer–read it again!
 
Whitney said:
I still find it hard when I imagine, for an example, two women who were both non-Catholic, marrying young, getting divorced then remarrying and having children. Then both learn the truth of Catholicism and would like to join the church, one was married initially a civil ceremony and the other in her parents church. One welcomed into the church and one told she would first need to leave her husband with whom she has young children in order to join.
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Well… no. Since they were non-Catholic, the Catholic requirements of form did not apply to them. On the face of it, both of them might be in valid first marriages! Both would need to look into the question of whether their first marriage was valid, prior to entry into the Church and access to the sacraments!
It just seems like a loophole that some benefit from, while others are condemned.
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Nope. What you’ve done here (unintentionally) is to move the goal-posts. Your initial example was about Catholics who marry; this new example is about non-Catholics who marry. Different standards hold for Catholics, non-Catholic Christians, and unbaptized.

The Foster book that @1ke recommended would be a good start.

(Has your RCIA program addressed the question of Christian marriage at any point in the program?)
 
Your long post was very helpful! Thank you! I will be reflecting again on it.
Erikaspirit16 said:
You lost me.
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I’m essentially making the point that for converts coming into the church, some would easily be able to annul their prior marriages and others would potentially have a harder time. The ones who have an easy time didn’t originally intend to leave loopholes in their marriage, because they had no concept of the catholic view of marriage.
 
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