It means that just because someone thinks that divorce is ok or that marriage is not indissoluble does not automatically mean that the marriage is invalid. In order for it to be invalid the person would have had to have made it a condition of his/her consent to the marriage.
After all, I can think objectively that divorce and remarriage is a reality but that doesn’t mean I don’t have the intention of being married to person X till death does us part.
This.
So, let’s suppose I’m engaged to be married. I’m sitting there, thinking, “well, sure … folks can get divorced, and that’s all good – but my relationship is
special! We’re
so in love that we’re never gonna get divorced!”
In other words, my idea that divorce is possible doesn’t necessarily have to figure into my consent: although I think that
some folks divorce, I’m thinking that I’m never gonna divorce. If that’s my thought, then my marriage isn’t invalid simply because I think that divorce is possible. After all, I’m walking into my marriage thinking that my marriage is “until death do us part.” To say it another way, what ‘determined my will’ was my belief that my marriage was gonna be forever.
So, I can’t later walk up to a priest and say, “my marriage was invalid since I’m cool with the notion of divorce.”
(On the other hand, if I was walking into my wedding day thinking, “meh… if it doesn’t work out, I can just bail and get a divorce”, then that marriage
would be able to be proven invalid, if it could be shown that this is what my state of mind was, as I headed to the altar.)
Make sense?