Year: 2010

The Catholic Church's practice of granting annulments is based on the idea that there are certain situations in which something prevents a valid marriage from coming into existence. The things doing the blocking are known as "impediments," and a variety of them are recognized in canon law.

When one or more impediments exists in a particular case and blocks a valid marriage from coming into existence, that union–upon due review by the Church–can be declared null or "annulled." An annulment, thus, is a finding of fact that there was some impediment that kept the marriage from coming into existence.

Annulments generally are not practiced in the Protestant community (though there are some civil-law annulments), and the concept of impediments is often unfamiliar to our Protestant brethren.

Recently I was asked how to respond to the claim that there are impediments to marriage is unbiblical.

It is true that the term "impediment" is not used in Scripture in regard to marriage. This is similar to the term "Trinity," which also is not used in Scripture. In both cases the term is a later way of making explicit something that is implicit in Scripture itself.

There is more than one type of marriage impediment, and they relate to Scripture in different ways. One type is the natural law impediment. Marriage corresponds to a certain natural law reality (a partnership between a man and a woman of the whole of life oriented to the good of the spouses and, if possible, the procreation and education of offspring). Marriage has certain properties (e.g., unity, indissolubility, the making licit of sexual love). These correspond to both the natural law and the biblical understanding of marriage. They are presupposed whenever Scripture talks about marriage. 

It follows that if someone–in attempting a marriage–has fundamentally excluded one of these criteria then they are not agreeing to be married in the sense that God's law defines the institution.

This is also why homosexual marriages are impossible. Two men or two women cannot agree to have between them the same kind of union that is possible for a man and a woman. The fact that the parties are of the same sex creates an impediment to their ability to marry each other.

The idea of homosexual marriage was, of course, unthinkable to the biblical authors, and it was not an idea being entertained in their society. (Though homosexual behavior was common in Greek society, they at least understood that marriage was between a man and a woman). Consequently, this is impediment is not mentioned explicitly in Scripture, but it is surely implicit in the biblical vision of what marriage is.

Another impediment which is clearly implied in Scripture is the existence of a prior marriage bond. If you are already married to one person, you are not free to marry another. This is explicit in the teaching of both Jesus (Mark 10) and Paul (Romans 7), with both indicating that the attempt to marry someone when you are already married will result in adultery.

It is clear that, in the minds of Jesus and Paul, being married to one person creates an impediment (something that blocks or impedes) one from marrying another person. The term "impediment" may be more recent, but the concept is clearly there.

Similar examples of impediments could be given–what if you're too closely related to each other so that there would be incest (can you marry one of your parents?) or what if you were severely retarded or mentally ill and did not understand what you were doing?

It is hard to imagine the biblical authors, who certainly shared the biblical vision of marriage, saying that such marriages would be valid. If such marriages are not valid then the factors preventing them from being valid are, by definition, impediments.

The question then would not be whether impediments exist but what impediments are there.

As I point out in my booklet, Annulments: What You Need to Know, the Church has a pastoral responsibility created by the teaching of Jesus on the permanence of marriage not to simply rubber-stamp any union. To do so would be to downplay or deny what Jesus taught. It is out of a sense of duty to her Lord, and of pastoral responsibility to the faithful, that the Church undertakes the difficult work of examining particular marriage situations to protect the validity of marriages.