One major problem with your scenario, Jackie is NOT dead.
Really?! Then that does change everything. I don’t know why I thought she had died. I should have checked. It was easy enough to find out, once you called me out on it. Thank you for making me get my facts on the case straight.
Nevertheless the principles I stated remain true. I should have checked to see if Jackie is still alive before I applied the principles to his situation, since it changes in some pretty important ways.
When an adult is received into the Catholic church, any purported marriages need to be clarified. If Jackie had died, my original analysis would have been the way to go. However, since she is still alive, Newt’s marriage to her would be presumed to be valid. And since he did not get an annulment before he married Marianne, his civil marriages to Marianne and Callista would clearly not be sacramentally valid.
Since Newt and Callista had no intention of separating when he converted to Catholicism, he would have to demonstrate to the Church that his marriage to Jackie was not sacramentally valid and that he was free to enter a sacramental marriage with Callista. I don’t know on what basis that annulment was granted, but from the public evidence, I can easily think of two possible reasons:
1. At the time he married Jackie, he may not have ever had the intention to remain sexually faithful to her. He may have presented other evidence, not publicly known, to support that claim.
2. His relationship with Jackie was unusual, to say the least, in ways that might have had a profound effect on his ability to have the necessary understanding of matrimony to enter into a sacramentally valid marriage with her. Newt and Jackie had started a sexual relationship when he was only 16 years old, and while she was his high school math teacher. There are all sorts of potential psychological impediments that could interfere with a 19 year old man’s ability to freely commit to marriage with woman seven years older than him, who happened to be in a position of authority over him, and with whom he had been sexually active for 3 years.
Whether these are the reasons the annulment was granted are mere speculation on my part. What is not speculation is that to enter the Catholic Church and continue living with Callista, Newt’s marriage to Jackie would have had to be declared invalid, and he would have had to enter a sacramental marriage with Callista. Anything less would be a lack of a sincere intention to live according to the teachings of Christ.