In one of these forum threads someone was talking about annulments and rights of the non guilty part.
What is meant by this? In a Catholic marriage annulment is there always a guilty person and a non guilty person or can both persons be deemed not guilty? what does all this mean anyhow?
Please explain.
Without knowing the posts in question, it’s impossible to explain them. As for annulments, though, we can take a stab at it.
There isn’t necessarily a guilty party or an innocent party in annulments. Normally, “guilty party” and “innocent party” are terms associated with divorce, which is an entirely different scenario. Divorce ends a marriage based on the fault of one or the other (or both of) the spouses; annulment is merely a declaration that the marriage never happened in the first place.
In Catholic theology, the minister of the Sacrament of Matrimony is
not the priest or deacon; it’s the bride and groom. This is important for annulments, because the intent of the minister is one of the requirements for any sacrament to be valid.
If one or both of the spouses harbors a secret intent not to enter into a valid Catholic marriage (e.g., “If it doesn’t work out, we can always get a divorce and find someone else”), then that minister of the Sacrament lacked the requisite intent to perform the Sacrament; so it did not happen – just as much as if a real Catholic priest were acting in a movie with a Mass scene; if he intended not to perform the Sacrament of the Eucharist, then it didn’t happen, no matter how much it looks like it did.
Sometimes an annulment is possible without any “fault” on the part of either putative spouse, while sometimes one or both of the putative spouses is at fault. The classic “shotgun wedding” is invalid, because one of the spouses is under duress, which means that s/he lacks the required free consent to marry. If one of them was validly married before to a person who is still living, then that putative spouse cannot validly marry. If one of them took vows in a religious order, s/he cannot validly marry. If it turns out a few years later that the bride and groom are actually each other’s long-lost brother and sister (don’t laugh; it actually happened once), then they did not validly marry, no matter how much they meant it at the time.
If either party lacks the necessary mental ability to marry or the intent to marry, then the Sacrament is invalid. One common example of this situation is when one or both of the putative spouses simply doesn’t understand what Catholic marriage is all about. If one of them lacked the intent to form a lifelong bond, or to be open to having children, or to be faithful to the other putative spouse, then the required intent is missing, and the Sacrament of Matrimony – despite all
appearances to the contrary – was not validly performed.
Notice that all of these situations depend on what’s going on
at the time the Sacrament is performed. Unlike divorce under the civil law, annulments are not aimed at terminating a marriage that validly began; a decree of nullity is a recognition of the fact that the Sacrament was not validly performed in the first place. So it doesn’t matter what happened afterward (except to the extent that things happening after the Sacrament might be indicative of intent before it). What matters is whether the ministers of the Sacrament intended to perform it at the time they went through the motions.
