Category: Marriage Involvement

A reader writes:

My brother, who is a
baptized Catholic but has not practiced since he was little (my
parents left the Church for a Protestant one at that time and have
since returned, though my brother is still Protestant) has
married outside of the church in a Protestant ceremony is now in the process of divorcing his wife, who is pregnant.
He also already has a new girlfriend whom he has expressed the intent
to marry. 

I have told him that I could not attend this wedding and
that I should not have attended his first wedding as it was outside
of the Church and he is a baptized Catholic, even though he has
rejected Catholicism. 

I know that he has not formally (that is
written to Rome) left the Church.  Have I done the right thing? 

This
is creating a huge amount of tension and stress in my family,
especially because I am trying to inform my now Catholic parents of
what the correct position is to take in regards to the potential
second wife, whom my brother has asked to be allowed to live at their
house (though not in his room…After separating from his first wife,
he moved back home). 

Though it is not in the planned future, I have
also told my family that I cannot attend my other brother’s wedding,
when and if he decides to marry, unless it is within the Catholic
Church.  Is this correct?  Please help.  Many hearts are hurting over
these matters.

This is a really tough situation, and my heart goes out to you.

The Holy See recently released a document on what is required in order to formally defect from the Church, and it took a startlingly restrictive view. One does not have to write to Rome to formally defect, but one does have to go through one’s local bishop.

The question in my mind is whether Rome intends this to apply to previous marital situations or just those from here on out. According to the Code of Canon Law,

Can. 16 §2. An authentic interpretation put forth in the form of law has the same force as the law itself and must be promulgated. If it only declares the words of the law which are certain in themselves, it is retroactive; if it restricts or extends the law, or if it explains a doubtful law, it is not retroactive.

It does not seem to me that the recent document merely declared the plain meaningof the words of the law which were already certain. What constituted formal defection was notoriously uncertain, and the canonical commentators I am aware of universally interpreted it more broadly than how the recent document did. The recent document therefore seems to me to either function as restricting the interpretation of the law or explaining a doubtful one. In either case, it would not be retroactive and thus your brother would not have needed to go through the local bishop in order to formally defect.

Unfortunately, Rome has not yet given us an authoritative statement on whether the new document is ot be understood retroactively, though I suspect that is coming since an awful lot of marriage cases have been adjudicated based on the prior understanding of formal defection, and that is bound to lead to confusion.

Even then, it is not clear to me whether your brother formally defected from the Church. One of the reasons that this concept was in need of clarification was that how it applied to situations like your brother’s was unclear. In other words: What about the case of children who are taken to other churches by their parents and made members of them? Does that mean that the child formally defected despite his lack of age and responsibility for doing so? Does he need to reaffirm the defection once he is an adult? Does he need to reaffirm it formally?

We now know the answers to these questions going forward, but at the time your brother was made a member of another church, the answers were unclear.

I thus can’t tell–both because of the unclarity of the law at the time and because it is at least arguable whether the law is retroactive–if your brother has formally defected.

The best way I know to handle the question is thus to split it and ask what would apply if he did formally defect and if he did not.

First, let’s suppose that he did formally defect.

Canon law provides that if a person has formally defected from the Church then he is not bound to observe the Catholic form of marriage. If your brother had formally defected then he would have been free to marry his first spouse. Marriage enjoys the favor of the law so, until the nullity of his first marriage is established, he must be presumed to be married to his first wife and thus not free to marry his current girlfriend. Any union with his current girlfriend must be presumed to be adulterous, per Jesus’ statements in Mark 10.

On this understanding, it would have been permissible for you to attend his first wedding but I could not recommend that you attend his second because your presence would lend credence to an objectively adulterous relationship.

Similarly, I could not recommend allowing two people who must be presumed to have an adulterous relationship to live under my roof, for the same reason: Doing so lends credence to an objectively adulterous relationship, as well as providing scandal (in the technical sense of setting a bad example that may lead others into sin). The same applies even if they are living chastely prior to attempting marriage. Your brother is not presumptively free to have a relationship with this woman, and letting her live there lends credence to the idea that he is.

Now let’s suppose that your brother did not formally defect.

In this case he was still bound to observe the Catholic form of marriage and his first marriage was invalid. He is thus free to marry someone else–however, this marriage too will be invalid unless he either observes the Catholic form of marriage or obtains a dispensation from it. In order to do either, he will for practical purposes need to have his first marriage investigated by an ecclesiastical tribunal and declared null (which is not certain for reasons indicated above, even though at the moment I’m assuming that he did defect and so it was null; that still has to be shown).

Your brother, as a non-Catholic, is presumably not willing to go through the above steps, in which case his new attempt at marriage would be invalid. I thus could not recommend attending it (or the previous one) nor letting him live in my house with his girlfriend (married or unmarried) since their planned future union would be invalid.

Thus, while one of the key facts of the case (whether or not he formally defected) is unclear, the practical conclusions are similar: I couldn’t recommend attending the new attempt at marriage nor allowing his girlfriend to live in the house, either before or after the attempt.

It is to be understood that, as a Protestant, your brother may be acting in good conscience in all this (though he would need an awful good reason to be divorcing a pregnant wife), and he cannot be expected to understand or appreciate the reasons outlined above.

Nevertheless, he needs to understand the reality of his situation. It does not do him any favors to confirm him in an adulterous or otherwise invalid union. If he is going to get his marital situation straightened out before God, he needs to be made aware of the truth and to be aware of it as soon as possible. Letting him get confirmed in a new, invalid union will only create a larger mess to be cleaned up later.

The merciful thing–as hard as it is–is to be honest with him now about his proposed union (honest both in word and in deed) and give him all the support and encouragement one can to help him avoid making a terrible mistake.

I would therefore explain to him as charitably as possible, and with as many family members as possible in agreement, why he needs to re-evaluate the situation, which also involves re-evaluating the question of his religious affiliation. If he is unwilling to do so, that is understandable. Nevertheless–as painful as it would be for him–he should respect the fact that as a Catholic you must follow your consciences even as he follows his.

None of this, I would hasten to point out, has anything to do with how much you love him. You still love him and, in fact, it is precisely because of your love for him that you are handling the matter in this manner.

I hope this helps, and I encourage my readers to pray for this situation!

20

Say you’re a widow with $125,000 to invest. You could stash it in a CD, you could play the stock market, you could add to your portfolio. All of those options are a bit tame and the rate of return may be unsatisfying. What to do? What to do? Hmmm. Maybe you could use it to bait yourself a millionare…. Eureka!

But, you know, there are risks to that venture, just as there are always risks of losing your investment. How to safeguard the investment? Hmmm. Well, if you can’t get the money you want out of marriage, you can always sue the matchmaker.

"A widow won $2.1 million from a high-priced matchmaker whom she claimed failed to deliver on promises of introductions to cultured, wealthy men.

"Anne Majerik, a 60-year-old social worker from Erie, Pa., claimed in a lawsuit that she paid Beverly Hills matchmaker Orly Hadida $125,000 to be introduced to men who wanted monogamous relationships, earned more than $1 million and had estates of up to $20 million.

"Instead, she said, she only got a few introductions to inappropriate men. For example, her suit claimed, the matchmaker’s ‘international banker’ turned out to be ‘an interpreter that worked in a bank.’"

GET THE STORY.

Amazingly enough, the jury foreperson Christie Troutt said of the award:

"We wanted to punish the defendant, but in the amount we wanted to punish the defendant, we didn’t want to reward the plaintiff. They were both wrong."

How, pray tell, does it not reward the plaintiff to turn her $125,000 investment into a cool $2.1 million, and without even the hassle of hammering out a prenup with her intended prey?

For a really grim view of the state of marriage in our society, just look at what some husbands and wives consider to be acceptable behavior: You can cheat on me so long as it is within the agreed-upon bounds of cheating on me:

"A New York magazine article entitled ‘The New Monogamy‘ [Editor note: Graphic picture illustrates article] states that marriages are becoming more and more open. The thinking is that agreed-upon ‘cheating’ will ward off the urge to stray further. In this view, as long as each spouse ‘sluts around’ (their words, not ours) within the boundaries deemed acceptable by both parties (rules range from just kissing to engaging in full-blown orgies), they aren’t actually cheating. Sure, it sounds pretty crazy. But let’s just go with it for now, keeping in mind how unnatural forsaking all others can feel to some in committed relationships — and how striving for true monogamy can outright ruin some relationships. So, provided the rules of engagement are mutually agreed upon, is the open approach reasonable?"

GET THE STORY.

One reason I think the idea of "slutting around" on your spouse is a perverse idea that is gaining ground in our society is because so many people simply have no idea what marriage is. People seem to think of marriage as an official stamp on a romance. Before extramarital sex gained enormous popularity, marriage was all too often seen as permission to have sex. Then when marriage was no longer seen as the gateway to sex, marriage became merely The Piece Of Paper that designated that a couple was Together, not for life but until they grew bored with each other. Now that it’s very easy to shed yourself of a spouse when he no longer thrills you, divorce seems to be becoming The Piece Of Paper that is unnecessary to obtain first before scoping out a hot date for the weekend.

A priest once told me that when he was in seminary some forty years ago, a fellow seminarian commented to him that the Church was badly in need of developing its marital theology. In the years since he was in seminary, my priest friend told me, John Paul II had given the Church fully seventy-five percent of its current theology of marriage. (There is no hard data supporting that number, only an educated guess by clergy with whom this priest had discussed the matter.)

The Church has had a great gift on the theology of marriage bequeathed to it by JPII and the Church will have its work cut out for it passing on JPII’s marital theology to a culture utterly clueless that marriage is not an amoral "hook-up" till boredom-do-us-part, but a vocation intended to form people in sanctity.

Unless you have a scuba tank.

I was going to use this picture as the  basis of a photo caption and make the lead joke about underwater weddings. . . .

Until I found out that’s exactly what’s going on here!

Well, almost.

It’s actually a pair of models doing advertising, but what they’re advertising is an underwater wedding service (that is, a service for performing underwater wedding services).

The service is available in Hong Kong, so it’d be a destination wedding in more than one sense if you went to one of these things (which you could do as long as the marriage would be presumptively valid–and as long as you have a scuba tank).

And no, the Church would not approve of this kind of thing. It’s turning what should be a solemn moment into a spectacle.

Now, having a wedding in a Catholic church located in an undersea city in the year 2079, that’d be an entirely different thing.

In the meantime,

GET THE STORY.

A reader writes:

My wife and I are lifelong Catholics and have brought our children up in the Church.   My son has just informed us that he is engaged to be married to a Protestant girl he has known for only 3 months.  We have discussed the local Catholic information course and suggested that they both attend this together so she can have a better understanding of his Faith.  We also requested they be married in the Church.  They have decided against this and have decided to get married in one month by her grandfather who is a minister.  I have discussed the importance of his decision and asked him to delay the marriage a few months.  I have made him aware that they need to consult with our Priest to find out what the Church requires (a dispensation).  He is not willing to wait and is determined to proceed with the wedding next month.

First, let me say that I really feel for your tragic and painful situation and will be praying for your family. What your son is doing is incredibly reckless by any standard. It is extraordinarily foolhardy, particularly in our culture today, to marry someone that you have known for a total of four months.

A few questions:

1. This marriage will not be valid which means he will in effect be "living in sin" and can no longer receive the Eucharist.  Will he still be able to attend Mass? 

Yes. People in states of sin can attend Mass. In fact, Catholics in a state of sin are still obligated to attend Mass.

What would be the point of going to Confession if he has every intent of continuing in the relationship?

None, as long as he’s unwilling to either live chastely or rectify his marital status.

2.  Is this a more serious sin because it is done with the full knowledge and intent to sin?

Increasing knowledge of the moral character of a sinful act does make it more sinful, though I don’t know enough to assess your son’s personal culpability. Only God sees the heart. Your son may be acting under passions so strong that diminish his culpability.

3.  Is it as simple to fix as having it later validated in The Church (after a good Confession)?

It is relatively simple to have a convalidation later, though there may be marriage preparation and other formalties that will be necessary first.

4.  What are our responsibilities as parents.  I know that we cannot "celebrate" the wedding in any way so as not to lend our presence to the ceremony and thereby indicate that it is "OK", but surely if we visit the couple at any time during their invalid marriage we would be implying that it is ok?  Does this mean we must no longer see our son?

The question of how to navigate social relationships without endorsing an invalid union is a very difficult question that many find themselves in. It is particularly painful and complex and depends in significant measures on how the parties are related to each other and how they would "read" different actions as messages saying things about the union.

Attending the wedding, celebrating anniversaries, letting two people share the same bed under your roof, etc., would all be actions that in our culture would be taken as an endorsement of the union. (And it is hard to see how they might be anything other than that, even in other cultures.)

However, social interactions not directly related to marriage may not be taken this way. For example, inviting people (who know that you don’t think that they are married) over to your house or going over to their house is often not read as an endorsement of a union in our culture. The act is remote enough from the marriage itself that in the opinion of many it is not necessary to refrain from these social interactions.

It most definitely is not necessary that you cut off all contact with your son. Indeed, maintaining contact with him may be essential to the future rectification of his situation. The difficult and painful thing is figuring out how to maintain contact in a way that does not send him false messages. Ultimately, one just has to do the best one can to muddle through that.

5.  If he rejects The Catholic Church and becomes a Protestant before the wedding, does this make it valid?

If he formally defects from the Church then yes, it would result in the marriage being valid. I would not his about this or even mention it to him, though, as formal defection from the Church is an intrinsically evil act. One cannot recommend an intrinsically evil act (defection from the true Church of Christ) in order that good may com of it (a valid marriage).

If, however, he learns of this on his own and asks about it then one would be at liberty to answer his questions honestly, pointing out that defecting from the Church is intrinsically evil and must not be done.

6.  If after the wedding he rejects The Church and becomes a Protestant would the wedding then be valid?

No, this has no bearing on whether the union was valid at the time it was contracted.

7.  If he continues in the invalid marriage with full knowledge, later gets divorced, returns to The Church, can the marriage be annulled?

Yes. In fact, it would be quite easy to annul it due to the facts of the case as outlined above. The Church has a special process for cases of this nature since invalidity is so easy to prove.

8.  With the limited information I have given you, what would you do if it was your son?

If it were me? I’d do the following:

• Pray really hard.
• Perform penitential acts on behalf of my son and his fiancee. (NOTE! It is important that any pentiential acts of a significant nature be undertaken under the guidance of a spiritual director in order to keep you from biting off more than you can chew or that might pose long-term harm to you.)
• Stress to my son that the course he is undertaking involves sin.
• Stress to him that it will complicate his future and make things harder for him in the long term.
• Point out to him that marrying someone you have known for only four months at the time of the weddig is incredibly foolhardy and that the success rates for such marriages is extraordinarily low. The odds are that he will go through a lot of pain and end up divorced, with all the complications that entails (including possibly having a kid or kids whose mother you are no longer married to).
• Point out to him that if he really loves this girl and that if the two of them really can make a go of it as husband and wife then the most loving thing he can do for the two of them is SLOW DOWN and give them a chance to get to know each other better and let their relationship mature. The breakneck speed he’s doing this at has far more likelihood of HARMING their marriage than helping it. There are issues they need to work out BEFORE they get married. Trying to work them out afterwards will only harm the two.
• Ask him to contemplate the magnitude of the decision he is making. Does he really understand what it means to make a LIFE-LONG commitment to this person based on having known her for this short space of time.
• I’d also go to the girl’s family and talk to them about the situation. The idea that her grandfather is willing to marry them in this circumstances is incredible, and her family may be able to be enlisted in talking some sense into these young people.
• I’d also try to live in hope. Something like a third of all marriage licenses that are taken out are never used. There is a significant chance that one or the other of these two young people will have a change of heart before the ceremony.

God bless, and I invite all blog readers to be praying for y’all!

20

A reader writes:

Hi Jimmy I could not find this exact permutation on your blog, although I’m sure it has come up. I hope you can take a moment to help me out.

No prob! Let’s work our way through it . . .

Sally and Bill, both catholics get married according to form in a church with a priest. This marriage ends in divorce.

Without anything else affecting the situation, the Church will presume that Sally is married to Bill. Obtaining a civil divorce does nothing to affect the status of their marriage before God. As far as the Church is concerned, Sally and Bill are hitched unless and until they obtain an annulment.

Sally then marries Tom, not a catholic, in a civil wedding outside the church. This also ends in divorce.

Okay, this marriage will be invalid since (a) Sally is presumed to be married to Bill and (b) Sally–the Catholic party to this marriage–failed to observe the Catholic form of marriage (without a dispensation) this time. Thus the impediments of ligamen (prior bond) and the impediment of defect of form will both block the new marriage from coming into existence.

Sally then marries Joe, a catholic, in a civil ceremony outside the church.

This also will be invalid since (a) Sally is still presumed to be married to Bill (from the first marriage) and (b) Sally and Joe both failed to observe the Catholic form of marriage (without a dispensation). As a result, ligamen and defect of form once again block the marriage from coming into existence.

Am I correct in thinking this last marriage of Sally’s is both illicit and invalid?

Yes.

My absence at this last wedding has caused a great deal of grief and I am having difficulty explaining to Sally and Joe why there is a problem with this wedding between two very loving people who are clearly devoted to each other.

You’ll want to explain it to them in as gentle and loving a way as possible, of course, but the basic fact of the matter is that Sally is presumably married to Bill and thus not free to marry Joe. Further, Sally and Joe failed to fulfill their responsibility as Catholics to observe the Catholic form of marriage or to obtain a dispensation from this requirement (something analogous to getting married without a wedding license, which is enough to invalidate a marriage in different states).

For you to have shown up at the wedding would have sent the message to Sally and Joe that what they were doing was okay, when it is not (Jesus was very firm on this point; see Mark 10). It thus would have been an offense against the truth for you to show up at the wedding.

That being said, you can offer to do everything you can to assist them if they wish to see about rectifying their marital situation. The first step in this process would be to begin pursuing an annulment on Sally’s prior marriages.

HERE’S THE BEST BOOK THERE IS ON THAT SUBJECT, TO HELP THEM OUT.

If the idea of marriage till death parts you is scary, some couples have come up with an Idea. Vow to stay married for "as long as we both shall love":

"Vows like ‘For as long as we continue to love each other,’ ‘For as long as our love shall last’ and ‘Until our time together is over’ are increasingly replacing the traditional to-the-grave vow — a switch that some call realistic and others call a recipe for failure.

"’We’re hearing that a lot — "as long as our love shall last." I personally think it’s quite a statement on today’s times — people know the odds of divorce," said New Jersey wedding expert Sharon Naylor, author of Your Special Wedding Vows, who adds that the rephrasing is also part of a more general trend toward personalizing vows.

"Naylor said killing the ‘death vow’ doesn’t mean that people don’t take their marriage promises seriously. Quite the contrary.

"’People understand that anything can happen in life, and you don’t make a promise you can’t keep. When people get divorced, they mourn the fact that they said ’til death do us part’ — you didn’t keep your word in church (if they had a church wedding). Some people are in therapy because they promised ’til death do us part’ — it is the sticking point in the healing of a broken marriage. The wording can give you a stigma of personal failure.’"

GET THE STORY.

Well, for those worried about the "stigma of personal failure," it can always be rephrased to "deferred success at marriage."   I had intended to comment on this story earlier, back when I first saw it, but Dale of Dyspeptic Mutterings beat me to it. For more commentary, go there.

GET THE FISK.

One of my favorite secular commentators is Judith Martin, also known as Miss Manners. Martin often has a wildly hilarious, yet absolutely commonsense take on the details of everyday life. As a Catholic apologist, easily the bulk of the questions I get are on marriage, annulment, and weddings, so this article on planning weddings made me howl with laughter and nod with agreement:

"Have you considered doing something unusual and individualistic at your wedding — not personalizing it?

[…]

"But none of these advantages [mentioned in the column] is the reason Miss Manners urges bridal couples not to think of their weddings as opportunities to showcase themselves. The real reason is that despite what you think, and despite what you have been urged to think by the wedding industry, your wedding is not ‘about you.’

"Your courtship is about you, and your marriage will be about you. And unless you drag all your wedding guests off to an exotic destination, your wedding trip will be about you.

"But a wedding is about your public entrance into the civic and often religious rituals of the society. Its emotional strength comes from long continuity — knowing that you are repeating the steps of those who preceded you and those who will follow.

"It is a shame to trade that rich and momentous step for Madison and Brad’s Day to Show Off."

GET THE STORY. (If bothered by the Evil Registration Requirement, use BugMeNot.com.)

A Catholic might add a bit more to this, such as pointing out, as Fulton Sheen did in his book Three To Get Married, God’s role in the production, but Martin’s basic analysis is definitely spot-on.

One of my favorite secular commentators is Judith Martin, also known as Miss Manners. Martin often has a wildly hilarious, yet absolutely commonsense take on the details of everyday life. As a Catholic apologist, easily the bulk of the questions I get are on marriage, annulment, and weddings, so this article on planning weddings made me howl with laughter and nod with agreement:

"Have you considered doing something unusual and individualistic at your wedding — not personalizing it?

[…]

"But none of these advantages [mentioned in the column] is the reason Miss Manners urges bridal couples not to think of their weddings as opportunities to showcase themselves. The real reason is that despite what you think, and despite what you have been urged to think by the wedding industry, your wedding is not ‘about you.’

"Your courtship is about you, and your marriage will be about you. And unless you drag all your wedding guests off to an exotic destination, your wedding trip will be about you.

"But a wedding is about your public entrance into the civic and often religious rituals of the society. Its emotional strength comes from long continuity — knowing that you are repeating the steps of those who preceded you and those who will follow.

"It is a shame to trade that rich and momentous step for Madison and Brad’s Day to Show Off."

GET THE STORY. (If bothered by the Evil Registration Requirement, use BugMeNot.com.)

A Catholic might add a bit more to this, such as pointing out, as Fulton Sheen did in his book Three To Get Married, God’s role in the production, but Martin’s basic analysis is definitely spot-on.