Please re-read my response. There’s more to the original story than you are presenting.
Catholic priests can not instruct ministers of other faiths to annul marriages, and would not care if they did. When you are confirmed into the Catholic faith, ALL previous sins are forgiven by Christ. Your sister was never married, as far as the Church was concerned.
I understand that the Church never recognized the civilly legal marriage of my sister and her husband. That’s why he was told during the conversion process he was “in the eyes of the Church living in sin.”
He was told that to proceed he’d have to get a church annulment of his first marriage, which was NEVER going to happen. Perhaps another alternative would have been to get a legal civil divorce from my sister or, he’d still have been ‘living in sin in the eyes of the Church.’ Barring that, it wouldn’t be a “past” sin that was to be forgiven. Ergo, under the circumstances, no conversion could go forward.
So far as I know, no other Christian denomination even has an annulment process. That’s strictly Catholic. So there was no asking of another minister to annul his/her church’s marriage. It was his first wife who absolutely refused to agree to a Catholic Church annulment. 25 years after the fact, despite having remarried civilly herself, she was still not accepting the legal divorce, so with that mindset, you can see that an annulment was absolutely out of the question.
I really don’t know what my brother in law would have done about converting had my sister not died. It was a tough spot to be in for him. So, assuming Mrs. Gingrich I did agree to the Church annulment, he was just awfully lucky.