DAY 82
CHALLENGE
“The Church is hypocritical in its opposition to divorce. Annulments are just the Catholic equivalent.”
DEFENSE
Annulments are not the same thing as divorce, and the Church’s teaching on annulments is rooted in the teaching of Jesus.
A divorce claims to sever a marriage bond that really existed, while an annulment is a finding that there never was an actual marriage in the first place.
This is why, when a civil court is asked to grant a divorce, the spouses don’t have to prove anything about the time they were married (other than that they were married). One spouse simply has to show that, after the marriage, one party did something that gave the other cause for the divorce (e.g., adultery, abuse, abandonment)—or, in an age of no-fault divorce, simply that they no longer wish to be married.
By contrast, when a Church tribunal is asked to grant a declaration of nullity (known as an annulment), it must investigate the circum- stances that applied at the time of the wedding, to see whether there were any factors present that would have prevented a valid (actual) marriage from coming into existence.
The fact that not all marriages are valid is clear from the teach- ing of Jesus, who stated: “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery” (Mark 10:11–12; cf. Luke 16:18). Jesus indicates that, in these cases, the second marriages are not valid. When the parties have sex, they are committing adultery against their first spouses, to whom they are actually still married. Thus some marriages (like the first ones) are valid, while other marriages (like the second ones) are not; they are null, and so in these cases, the Church can issue a decree of nullity, or an annulment.
There can be a variety of factors that cause a marriage to be null from the beginning. Already being married is only one of them. How- ever, the purpose of an annulment is not to dissolve a marriage that exists but to show that—despite appearances—it did not really exist. TIP
For more information on the Church’s teaching on divorce, see Day 132.