Posted on 11/25/2013 6:53:25 PM PST by marshmallow
That doesn't matter. Regardless of whether the first marriage was done within the Church or outside it, it must be nullified before the remarried person can take Communion. Or in Newt's case, both marriages must be nullified.
Not sure how you can be forgiven if you are obstinant what your doing isn't a sin, don't wish to confess the sin and amend your life.
My point about Newt is that since they were married in the Church, his previous marriages had to have been dealt with.
If it wasn't right flat out there in the documents, they'd have HAD to contact her and interview her. Unless the former spouse is strictly no able to be interviewed (missing in a flood disaster and presumed dead, moved and whereabouts unknown, in a coma and not communicative, etc.)
The priest is probably right that it's out of his hands. Especially if it was cut-and-dried on the basis of the documents alone. These things are done at the Diocese level, not at the parish level.
It appears that the lady who was married and divorced 5 times, at no point had a valid Christian marriage. Which is not surprising, since she was neither a Jew nor a Catholic, but a Samaritan. She wouldn’t even have to go ask about annulment, as they were all null “marriages” from a canonical point of view.
In other words, if they did all that, and if there was no additional difficulty of scandal (e.g. ex-spouse in the same parish, his-hers-and-theirs kids in the school) it could be resolved at the parish level by Confession and commitment to abstain from sexual relations. If there were any open scandal, though, all bets are off.
It was nothing along those lines I am sure. What it might have been was that she was pregnant when they married, and he thought he was pressured into marrying her.
The fact is that there are more than 60,000 annulments granted in the US last year. I wouldn’t be surprised if that were not more than the total number of marriages in the Church in the US for the year.
Also a fact is that the vast majority of annulments that are ask for are granted in this country.
“There is no difference between the Church in Germany and the Church anywhere else in the world. Moral laws are universally valid.”
There are far more annulments every year in this country than all other countries combined.
In my view, they should have contacted the ex-wife and gotten other first-person testimony as well (e.g. the bride's father: did he threaten that he'd get his shotgun and perforate the guy if he didn't marry her? Was there a threat that the girl would be cut out of his will?)
Just *saying* "I felt pressured" shouldn't be enough to do it. In my opinion. Pregnancy is an objective thing, "pressure" is not. Unless he had *told* people before and after the wedding that he was pressured, and they sent in corroborating written testimony to the Tribunal.
An annual figure of 60,000 annulments has to indicate massive pastoral malpractice on the part of the priests who were officiating at the nuptials to begin with. They are (or were) evidently marrying huge numbers of couples negligently or fraudulently, Problem 1.0
Now nobody's getting married. Which is the even bigger Problem 2.0
“Just *saying* “I felt pressured” shouldn’t be enough to do it. In my opinion. Pregnancy is an objective thing, “pressure” is not. Unless he had *told* people before and after the wedding that he was pressured, and they sent in corroborating written testimony to the Tribunal.”
I don’t know if I agree with that. This was in the sixties, and societal pressures were pretty strong regarding these things in those days. Regardless of what he may have said to others, only he would know. And after 35 years of marriage his memory of it could be half made up. That’s the way memory works.
First, the number of declarations of nullity are sometimes a bit exaggerated. Although some sources indicated that by the early 1990s, US annulments were at the level of 60K+, by the second half of the last decade, that had moderated to around 30K.
Nonetheless, that's a lot of annulments.
But something I've learned over the years is that many annulments take place within the context of conversion or coming into full communion with the Church. Most of the people I know who have received one or more annulments were converts or being received into full communion who were obtaining declarations of nullity for their pre-Catholic marriages. And many of these folks had two or more previous marriages to have declared null.
So the actual number of Catholics who receive annulments is probably substantially less than even the 30K per year number.
And many of these cases were clearly marriages that were not sacramental. For one thing, a non-Catholic who divorces and doesn't obtain a declaration of nullity (why would they?) before entering into subsequent marriages cannot possibly have valid subsequent marriages. Yet, the Church requires that each subsequent marriage be declared null, separately (although often it isn't much more than a formality).
I have a friend who married the first time because his father-in-law-to-be informed him that the wedding could either be a figurative shotgun wedding, or he would oblige and make it literally a shotgun wedding, as my friend had made his father-in-law-to-be's little angel with child.
The second marriage was a favor to my friend's new father-in-law-to-be to keep his daughter from having to go back to a former Soviet republic, where awaited her bad things. My friend was cool with this, as she was bi-sexual and often invited her girlfriends to come “play” with her and my friend. I'm fairly sure that was an indicator on both their parts of a certain defect in their understanding of the nature of marriage.
Another friend of mine, although a baptized Christian, didn't regard marriage as either a sacrament or a permanent, till-death-do-us-part kind of relationship. Rather, he viewed it as a legitimated outlet for sex. He, too, had been married twice in his pre-Catholic days.
Christendom is dead. We no longer live in a culture that is in harmony with Christian morality, ideals, and especially, beliefs. It is no wonder that many people, even many Catholics, are more pagan than they are Christian, that their grasp of Catholic belief and practice is tenuous. I'd say that explains at least some of the explosion in the granting of declarations of nullity.
sitetest
That’s why his saying he “felt pressured” 35 years after the fact, shouldn’t be determinative. The Tribunal should get corroborating testimonial evidence, IMHO. But then, I’m not a Canon Lawyer.
Here, here!
Or is it Hear hear?
Divorced and Remarried Catholics cannot receive any of the sacraments, never mind the Holy Eucharist
Not true. I received Last Rites after a surgery and the Priest knew I was Divorced.
That would be jacked up to refuse last rites, absolving of all you sins just before or someone who could potentially die.
not a chance...marriage is insoluable...if you divorce, legally, and remarry, you are actually living in the state of adultry....you are still married to the original spouse whether you like it or not.
This is nearly the atheist argument against God when faced with evil. While the annulment process need to have greater efficiencies... Ignoring the teachings of the Church and of Jesus Christ himself is probably a bad idea.
It’s not the civil divorce... It’s the remarriage.
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