I don’t know much but here is my understanding of things:
Assuming your children are baptized you could proably enroll them in any CCD class. If they are baptized you already vowed to raise them in the faith, which includes instructing them, or getting them instruction, and ensuring they go to mass regularly among other things, even if you can not recieve communion.
I don’t need to remind you what Jesus said about divorce living with someone else, however if you were never married sacramentally to begin with than there was never a sacramental marriage to divorce. Since it is the spouses who are the ministers for the sacrament of marriage the church assumes they did it correctly, formed a valid marriage, unless an inquiry proves otherwise. That act that the church declares that your marriage wasn’t sacramental is called an annulment.
Such things like being already married to someone else (even though legally divorced,) killing the potential spouse’s former spouse in order to marry, being forced to marry, not giving free consent, not being open to children, Catholics not being married in the church, etc means that the right things wern’t there for there to be a marriage to begin with.
Also if that person is now dead the marraige is no more; dead people can’t be married.
In order to get the ball rolling on it see your parish priest. There are books and stuff written about it too if you need to.
Assuming the annulment process claims you arn’t married already, then you need to go through the convalidation process with the current husband so that the church can convalidate or put its blessing on the current marriage. Catholics need to be married like Catholics, so its a relatively simple process, it can be less than an hour as I recall. Now I’m not sure wheter its simply putting the church’s blessing on it or adding an essential ingredient to make it sacramental, you may want to ask someone more knowlegeable about that.
Seperation is understandable in certain circumstances, but Jesus teaches strongly against having sex with someone else. So until you are sure you are not married to the previous husband its not a good idea to be having intimate relations with him.
A simple confession is all that is needed to come back, and you can take communion too, assuming you dont have marital relations (which could be adultry, we’re unsure until the results of the tribunal come back.) First Coritnthians 11 explicitly bans us from recieving communion in a state of mortal sin, so thats why if you continue to sleep together (because it could be adultry) you shouldn’t recieve communion, although you are still encouraged to attend mass.
As for your husband who is baptist simply pray for him, God will give you all the strength you need for whatever he wants for you and him. St. Monica’s husband was a pagan, this caused a lot of issues but utimately, she became a saint, and her son, St. Augustine, didn’t turn out to bad either.
Getting your son baptized shouldn’t be an issue if you promise to raise him in the faith. Now if it turns out your marriage wasn’t annuled and you begin to sleep again with your current husband I don’t know if the priest will take issue with it because if someone knowingly rejects a teaching of the church to essentialy commit adultry one could question if the willingness to raise the child in the faith is that person herself chooses to reject the faith. Although until the annulment process is completed the person will proably be given the benifit of the doubt. Talk to a preist about it becasue the decision is up to him.
You should proably ask someone more compitent than me. My feeble explanation was the long way around, the short way is go to confession and everything is honky dory! Pray, read your bible, and go to church. Pray with faith and you won’t believe what God will do in your life.
Oh, BTW, pray, pray, pray, pray.
