I just have one big little problem - annulments.
Just for a little background, I was raised in the United Church of Christ, which I have heard many times referred to by members and clergy as a haven for "recovering Catholics." Catholicism is often mocked in my family, or at least it was before I married one, so now they at least refrain from doing so around us. But my husband might consider himself a recovering Catholic. He certainly has less interest in Catholicism than I do. So I hope the reader can forgive my ignorance as I wrestle the issue of annulments. I found a useful Q&A on americancatholic.org by Joseph M. Champlin, which is really the extent of my knowledge of the subject.
Since I'm not Catholic, annulment was never an issue with my parents, but it was for my husband's parents, who did get an annulment. My parents' divorce gave me a feeling of being invalid. Many children of divorce feel that their parents' divorce is somehow their fault. I never felt to blame exactly, but I felt irrelevant, unnecessary, extraneous. The love that created me didn't last. The love that was responsible for my existence failed. My parents never explicitly spoke or acted as if having children had been a mistake, and I know they always loved us, but I got the vague sense that they sometimes felt that their lives would be easier if they could just get a completely fresh start with no attachments of any kind to each other. It sometimes felt like they wished they could divorce us too. An annulment, however, takes this feeling a step further. If your parents' marriage is annuled, then it means that the love that created you didn't just fail; it was fundamentally inadequate from its very conception. Here's a quote from the American Catholic article I linked above:
"The Catholic Church presumes that marriages are valid, binding spouses for life. When couples do separate and divorce, therefore, the Church examines in detail their marriage to determine if, right from the start, some essential element was missing in their relationship. If that fact has been established, it means the spouses did not have the kind of marital link that binds them together for life."
When the Church affirms your parents' divorce with an annulment, they are saying to you that your parents may have loved each other, and their marriage may have been legally valid, but on the most meaningful spiritual level, it never even existed. Your parents never had the "marital link that binds them together for life." The Church is also telling your parents that. In fact, Champlin urges couples to consider the circumstances surrounding their marriage this way:
"Was there something missing right from the start, something radically wrong from day one? Before the wedding, were there warning signals, red flags which you may have dismissed simply as the cold-feet anxieties rather common for couples prior to a nuptial service? Did you suffer deep difficulties early in your marital life and worry about them, but, never having been married before, judged they were merely the expected burdensome part of marriage? Now, perhaps years later, you view them as symptomatic of a much more serious problem, a radical malfunctioning in your relationship."
The qualifier, "never having been married before" implies that a previous marriage might impart greater wisdom and help one to recognize the difference between normal marriage trials and and "radical malfunctioning." Yet the failure rate of second marriages is higher than the failure rate of first marriages, so this can't be true. Practicing marriage doesn't appear to make one better at it. Marriage doesn't work that way. Of course the experience would impart its lessons that may or may not help in some way when one is married a second time, but ultimately, marriage is not a skill, it's a commitment. Maintaining a commitment requires maturity, regardless of any particular knowledge or wisdom.
Reading the passage above gave me chills, imagining my in-laws being urged to think about their marriage as being fatally flawed from the beginning. It's no wonder the question of the children's legitimacy is so often raised by parents being encouraged to view their failed marriage this way. Here is the answer from the article to the question, "Does an annulment make the children illegitimate?"
"No. The parents, now divorced, presumably once obtained a civil license and entered upon a legal marriage. Children from that union are, therefore, their legitimate offspring. Legitimate means “legal.” The civil divorce and the Church annulment do not alter this situation. Nor do they change the parents’ responsibility toward the children. In fact, during annulment procedures the Church reminds petitioners of their moral obligation to provide for the proper upbringing of their children.
Nevertheless, persons pondering the Catholic annulment process do often express this concern about the legitimacy of the children after that procedure. It’s a
persistent rumor."
Perhaps the persistence of this rumor is related to the fact that children of an annuled marriage may feel spiritually illegitimate. Our parents may have followed civil law, and therefore, we are legitimate in the eyes of the law, but what does the Church have to say about the spiritual legitimacy of our family and even our existence? If the marriage never really existed in a spiritual sense, then wasn't our conception some kind of sin? Our parents must have made some kind of mistake for us to be dealing with this outcome. If marrying each other in the first place was their main mistake, then where exactly does that leave the conception of children within this fundamentally flawed marriage?
Jesus declared remarriage to be adultery, and said that no man should separate what God has joined. This is apparently why the Catholic Church feels the need to annul prior marriages before they can sanction remarriages. I respect this approach to divorce far more than the one taken by the church I was raised in. However, the Catholic approach seems to be even harder on the children. Not only is the Church telling you that your parents never had a true marriage, but it's practically telling your parents that the failure of their marriage wasn't their fault. The Church is saying that the marriage was so fatally flawed from the beginning that it wasn't a real marriage, and there is nothing the couple could have done to make it one.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that my mother-in-law is having the exact same marital troubles in her second marriage that she had in her first.
The Catholic theology of marriage is solid. I imagine the problem with annulments is reflective of the wider problem of divorce in our society. It makes sense that the Church would not want to alienate large numbers of the faithful in the wake of the divorce revolution by refusing to allow most of their divorced members to remarry. It seems that no-fault divorce laws put the Church between a rock and a hard place. Still, I have a very hard time believing that so many marriages, including that of my in-laws, were spiritually invalid. I have a hard time believing that so many of our parents simply entered fatally flawed marriages that they couldn't possibly have maintained.
I found this part of the article about possible grounds for annulment to be the saddest:
"For example, a couple, discovering her pregnancy, decide to marry; only much later do they recognize the lack of wisdom in that decision."
Two people create a child and then decide to marry to raise that child, and that displays a lack of wisdom? I recognize that lots of people marry someone that isn't an ideal match due to pregnancy, but doesn't the lack of wisdom in those cases rest more in their decision to engage in unprotected premarital sex? Or, more appropriate to Catholic teaching, premarital sex of any kind? Champlin, although surely well-intentioned, has essentially disconnected childrearing from marriage. Surely, such cases where poor marriages are formed to raise a child conceived under less than ideal circumstances are unfortunate, but I still believe that anyone who marries to raise a child that they have conceived is doing something admirable, even if their marriage does fail in the end. I would rather see a church acknowledge divorce and the fact that people can separate what God has joined, even though they shouldn't, rather than see a church declare failed marriages to be fatally flawed from the start.
Most of all, I'd like to see a church that believes divorce is a sin and remarriage is adultery, yet treats the divorced and remarried with respect and compassion, making sure to articulate that the love in a good second marriage, if it is indeed a good one, outweighs the sin of adultery that it also embodies, and that although their situation is less than ideal, the two people in it are loved and forgiven by God and the church. Such a church would also reach out to the children so they don't have to feel that their parents' failures reflect on them. If I ever find a church like that, I just might join it.
