For the posters on this thread that care to answer I am curious to know:
1: How many people do you know who filed for a Catholic annulment and of those, how many were granted and how many were not?
2: Were you ever a witness in the process for someone hoping to procure an annulment and what was your experience as one?
Mary.
One involved a couple in which the wife submitted a request based partly on her husband’s incapacity to stick with a long-term commitment. He testified that he did understand the commitment, did understand it was for life, did have the capacity to have stuck around, but he just didn’t feel like it, and so he left. The marriage was found to be valid.
In another case (in which I testified), the questionaire very specifically asked for evidence and not conclusions. They didn’t want amateur psychoanalysis. They wanted to know what went on before the marriage, what went on after, what was said and done, and so on. The husband had always talked as if rules didn’t apply to him, although behind the back of authority. To them, he gave the answers he thought would make him look good. That marriage was found to be invalid, even though the couple had been married for many years and had children as old as high school. The children, who had witnessed more of the marriage than I had, had a more severe attitude against their father than I had. They said they were glad when their parents divorced and wished that their mother had left their dad and his abusive and unfaithful ways long before she did.
I am becoming increasingly disturbed by some of the vague reasons that I hear given for annulments. Reasons like “psychological immaturity” sound extremely dubious to me. I have no problem at all with the concept of annulments, but it had always been my understanding that they should only be granted in a few, very specific circumstances…
I know there are probably other valid reasons for an annulment, too, but it needs to be something along the same lines as the list above. It seems to me that if one or more of these criteria are met, the marriage probably wouldn’t last very long anyway. But in reading Catholic blogs and forums, I keep hearing stories of people married many years with several children who still get annulments. It seems to me that if two baptized Catholics get married in the Church, go through marriage prep, try their best to follow church teachings, stay married for many years and have several children, there is a 99% chance the marriage is valid.
This doesn’t mean they won’t get divorced. But if they do get divorced, they need to stay single for life unless their spouse dies or they reconcile. Re-marriage without an annulment is adultery, full stop, and shouldn’t be allowed. I am NOT arguing that they should be allowed to remarry. But I do think that vague psychobabble B.S. has no place in annulments.
Once I posted on this forum about some problems in my marriage, and a couple people suggested that my marriage might be invalid. I found this EXTREMELY offensive. It was very disturbing how quickly people jumped to that conclusion. When we got married, my husband and I were both devout, practicing Catholics who married in the Church, dated for several years before marriage, talked about absolutely everything, and obeyed all Church teachings. If our marriage isn’t valid, no marriage is valid.
The bottom line is that it should not be that hard to contract a valid marriage! It should not be something only for super-holy elite Catholics with PhDs in the Theology of the Body.
I think what you are missing is this: If someone attempts marriage in good faith, believing it to be valid, but find later that in fact that marriage did not actually have any realistic chance of lasting for as long as both spouses lived, justice cannot hold that someone to renounce all chance to live out their vocation to marriage within a real valid marriage.
I think we live in a time where there is a great deal of pretense standing in for reality. Pretense can last for a surprisingly long time, but eventually it will wilt. Very often, a couple stays together for a long time, but what you can’t see from the outside is that they stayed together not because their marriage had a true foundation, but out of a combination of force of will and inertia. For instance, perhaps one spouse is an adulterer–was in the beginning, was throughout the marriage. What can change after many years and many children is that the other spouse is finally forced to admit that he or she cannot fix the other person, nor make up for the fatal flaw of ingrained infidelity or ingrained abusiveness. There can get to be a point where no amount of fidelity on one side can keep on compensating for an enduring lack of fidelity on the other.
That is not to say, however, that people never leave a valid marriage under the pretense that it could not work. I believe that happens because I’ve had people tell me that they realized too late that they did that very thing. They believed their marriage suffered from an immovable flaw, and found out later that they were the flaw and they could change. Their marriage had failed not out of incapacity, as they had believed, but out of hard-heartedness. (This was a non-Catholic telling me this, so there was no declaration of nullity involved.) That can happen, and discerning from the outside whether a person is incapable or hard-hearted can be very difficult. The tribunals have to do their best to judge the evidence they have, and it is evidence kept secret from everyone else. I think we do well to accept that we haven’t heard or seen all the evidence nor sat in on the deliberations of the tribunals, and so we cannot say. There are people at the Vatican who are privy to these details, and it is their job to say whether these judgments are being made with a right understanding.
