REACT: Notre Dame Prof Explains Catholic Annulments

The Catholic Church declares/determines tens of thousands of marriages are invalid each year in America.  What criteria do they use to issue these annulments? If so many marriages are invalid, how can a Catholic know they're married when they say "I do?"  I respond to Mark Gurtner's excellent presentation at the University of Saint Francis ( @usfuts404 ) of the Catholic Church's doctrine on annulments.  He is a professor at Notre Dame and a Vicar General in Indiana ( Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend @dioceseoffortwayne-southbe5636 ). He knows this area of Catholic teaching in theory, but he is also intimately familiar with the practice of declaring marriages null.  So much so, that he, in a moment of vulnerability, says it sometimes keeps him up at night.  While I respect the intellectual history and work that has gone into the Catholic teaching on marriage, in this episode, I express my disagreement where I find it deviates from Scripture.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to the Divorce Your Remarriage podcast. I'm Chris Iverson, and a friend of mine on YouTube here asked for me to go through the Catholic view on marriage and divorce and remarriage and annulments. And so we're going to do that in two episodes. This is the first of the two. And I found this person here, actually. This is uh Mark Gertner, and he's a professor. Uh, he was a professor at Notre Dame. He's the judicial vicar guy of this diocese. Is a really smart guy. You'll see by the way he teaches. He understands it very clearly, and he's gonna go through it uh step by step. Here he's talking specifically about annulments, but he's going to lead up to that by giving us the Catholic view on marriage, and I'm gonna go ahead and react to that.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

I have to tell you that tonight's lecturer, Father Mark Gertner, has a unique kind of creative genius because he's able to take something that we might be prepared to think of as rather dull and bring it to life. Then, after a brief two-year stint as pastor of St. Anthony's in South Bend, he returned to Our Lady, where he is still today the pastor. Since earning a canon law degree, he has been a judge in the tribunal and currently serves as the judicial vicar in charge of the entire administration of the tribunal. He also teaches a fall course in canon law at the University of Notre Dame.

SPEAKER_02 1:27

But rather that marriage comes from God. And in fact, uh, if you think about the scriptures from the book of Genesis, after God created the world, the very next gift that he gives to humanity is marriage. It's the very first thing after creation. So we believe that marriage comes from God and that its structure comes from God. So let's talk a little bit about that structure and what we believe. So, first, the church says we believe that marriage is a sacred covenant. Now, a covenant, uh most of us have probably heard this word before. A covenant is a contract. It is a special kind of contract, but it is a contract. So think about, for example, what a contract means. In a contract, two people usually agree to things and they exchange things. So uh, you know, let's say uh uh sister, let's say that you and I are gonna go into a contract, and let's say that you're gonna buy my car. Okay. So my I have a newish Nissan, yeah, not too bad, you know, for a priest to don't make much, right? Okay, so my car is probably worth about twelve thousand dollars, right? So for my part of the contract, I have to give you the car. For your part of the contract, uh you have to give me the money. I have to give you the keys and the title, too. Okay, so my part of the contract is the car, the keys, and the title, your part of the contract is the money, okay, and we exchange those things, and then the contract is satisfied, right? Do we have to like each other, sister? Probably not. No, it'd be nice if we did, right? It'd be nice if we did, but we don't have to like each other. You know, we don't have to even you know be friendly to each other for the contract to be satisfied. Now, a covenant, though, is like that. In a covenant, things are exchanged, but it's a special kind of contract. Because in a covenant, not only are things being exchanged, the people themselves are being exchanged.

SPEAKER_01 3:44

He is starting with the nature of the agreement to be married. Then he's also going to talk about the nature of marriage. And so the nature of the agreement, he's saying here, is a covenant. And I agree with him. The difference between a contract, a regular contract, and a covenant is that a contract is between humans, two or more humans, and they contract the things, like he said with the car. A covenant, though, is an agreement that where God um is involved in a special way. So Matthew 19, 6 says, Jesus says that God joins the bride and the groom together when they get married. So God's involved in a special way, hence it's a covenant. Now he says that a covenant is a type of contract. Um, I prefer to say that there are agreements. There's a contract is one kind of an agreement, and a covenant is another kind, and the covenant is the one that has God uh involved in a special way. So that's just a kind of a terminology thing. Now, at one point he did say that marriage is a covenant, and I don't think he actually technically meant that. You know, he's just talking in front of people or whatever, but uh, because I think he believes the agreement is a covenant, but later on he'll say, like, for example, a sacramental marriage is a sacrament, and that the nature of a sacrament uh is different than the nature of a covenant. So anyway, the agreement is a covenant. I we agree. That's kind of easy. Uh, and then the question then is what is the nature of marriage? And we'll get to that here in a minute.

SPEAKER_02 5:09

So think about what God did with the Israelites, for example. You know, uh, you know, the contract at Mount Sinai, God gives them the Ten Commandments, you know, He's giving him Himself. And what do the Israelites say? You might not remember, but they say, we will do everything God says, right? Now they don't do it, you know, that's they sin, but you know, there's an exchange there, there's an exchange going on. Okay, that's what happens in marriage, is that there are things being exchanged, you know. I promise to be faithful to you, I promise to live with you for the rest of my life, I promise to uh uh allow my body to share in sexual relations with you with openness to children and so forth. So there are things being exchanged when two people get married, but also the people are being exchanged. They they they're saying, I give myself to you and you give yourself to me. Okay, so that's the first thing. Marriage is a sacred covenant between a man and a woman, for the partnership of the whole of life. So this is the whole the whole thing that marriage is ordered to is the partnership of the whole of life. Okay. One of the questions that I love to ask my engaged couples when I'm preparing them for marriage, they're they're usually not ready for this question either, is I ask them, what is marriage for? And they look at me like, what is marriage for? You know, they've never thought about marriage in those terms, but you know, God never designs anything without a purpose, without a reason. And so too it is with marriage. God designed marriage for a reason, for a purpose. And so this partnership of the whole of life is meant for two purposes, God says, through the church. First is for the good of the spouses. So, in other words, marriage is supposed to make the people better people. Again, Saint John Paul II once said that our vocations are God's way of teaching us how to love. Our vocations are God's way of teaching us how to love. So in marriage, you know, the self-sacrifice, uh, the patience, uh, the putting up with one another through thick and thin, you know, these are meant to help us to become more like God, to grow in goodness, to grow in holiness. Uh indeed, this is the pathway for salvation for those who are called to this vocation. So this is the first reason what marriage is for, for the good of the spouses. Secondly, marriage is for the procreation and education of children. God has designed, of course, that new life should come through the family, and that it is only that it is in the family, that it is the best way for a new life to come to come about and for them to be reared in goodness and uh to grow in goodness and to learn to love God and so forth. Okay. So, this is what we believe that marriage is. This is what we believe, how God has shown us marriage to be, his structure for marriage, his plan for marriage. Uh okay. Now, when two people marry, two, just say, you know, just two people, two non-baptized people, uh marriage still takes place. One does not have to be a Christian in order for marriage to take place, because uh marriage is a natural reality. God wrote it into creation. Again, it's one of the first things that God gave us after creation itself. So when two non-baptized people get married, their marriage uh is called a natural marriage or a natural bond. But the Lord Jesus gave something uh special for marriage. When two baptized people enter into marriage, then that marriage becomes a sacrament. So as the documents put it, sacramental bond. Jesus raised marriage to the dignity of a sacrament.

SPEAKER_01 9:50

So I get asked sometimes whether or not my view on divorce or remarriage is the Catholic view, and it is not. And this is a great example of where of to show that some of the distinctions between my view and the and the Catholic view. So now I agree. Non-believers, they get married, it's a real marriage. I totally agree with that. But I disagree with the distinction between these bonds. So marriage is not a sacrament. Now, there's evidence that marriage was treated as a sacrament in like the 12th century. It was officially added as a sacrament, I believe, in 1563, during the Council of uh Trent. And some people try to trace it back to Augustine, but that's complicated because the meaning of the word sacrament kind of changed over time. The idea behind a sacrament is it's a means of grace, it's a it's a it's a way through which one receives grace. And believers can receive grace through the experience of many types of relationships and circumstances that non-believers just aren't going to experience in the same way. But that's very different from saying like the nature of the marriage bond is ontologically different, and therefore it's like sacramental versus versus natural. Um, and so believers, you know, experience marriage differently than uh non-believers, but that doesn't mean that they have a different ontological uh bond. So, what is the nature of marriage then? So in Genesis 2, Adam says of Eve, she is my bone and flesh, and that's family language. We see that in Genesis 29, 14, where Laban says of Jacob, are you not my bone and flesh? So the bond of marriage is uh a bond of family. So therefore, just as I cannot make my brother to not be my brother, so I can't make my spouse to not be my spouse. We're family. I can't unsibling my sibling, I can't unspouse my spouse. People are married for life. This is assumed, this family bond is assumed in Leviticus 18, where it has all these laws about relations between certain people is uh is incest. And you look at those relationships, some of those relationships, it's incest because they're family, not through blood, but through marriage. So both family through blood and family through marriage are both treated equally as incest because marriage is family, it's a family relationship. And we see this with John the Baptist. He was killed. Mark chapter six, he is telling Herod it's unlawful for him to marry Herodias. Why is it unlawful for him to marry Herodias? Because Herodias was the wife of Herod's brother. So Herod had a brother, Herodias was married, so Herodias was Herod's sister-in-law. She divorced Herod's brother and then went to go marry Herod. That's incest, John the Baptist said it. John the Baptist was killed for him standing for the sanctity of marriage. And now then you might say, well, wait a minute, didn't they divorce? Didn't Herodias divorce Herod's brother? So now she's no longer family, right? Because that marriage has been divorced. No, no, they're still married. That's the whole reason why it's still incest for Herod to marry Herodias, because divorce is not end a marriage. You can see that there in Mark chapter six. So all marriages that are valid create family. And so ontologically, the bond isn't stronger or weaker, depending on if the spouses are believers or not. Uh now, in the daily experience of marriage, there's going to be uh more grace and more alignment between the two true believers and all that, but that doesn't change the nature of the bond. The bond is family.

SPEAKER_02 13:22

Now, I want to talk first, before I go into what the sacrament is, just a little bit about this bond. Because this is a very important thing for everyone to understand about what this means. So when two people get married, excuse my stick figures, when two people get married, if you will, if you want to put it in these images, their souls are bonded together. And this is a spiritual bond. Now, a lot of times when people hear the word spiritual, maybe not for us as Catholics, but just in general, when people hear the word spiritual, what do they usually equate that with? I think they usually equate it with like something that's not really real, right? Or something that's like a cloud, you know, that can kind of just come and go and dissipate at will. But when we talk about something that's spiritual, we don't mean that. And this spiritual bond that is created between two people when they are married is a real thing. It's just as real as the sun in the sky. You know, it's not this puffy cloud thing that can kind of dissipate. It is a it's a reality. When two people get married, the spiritual bond is created, which is as real as the sun in the sky. This is very important because for us as Catholics, this means that in marriage, we don't have the authority over this bond, according to our own will, right? This is this comes from God. So even though, uh, you know, moving ahead a little bit to say, you know, when marital life breaks down and when two people maybe move toward a civil divorce, even though the state of Indiana or some judge might say, you know, the marital bond no longer exists or the marital bond is broken. You know, when we in the tribunal, when we see we'll see those kind of lines in civil divorce documents, you know, the judge will say, you know, I dissolved this marriage. Well, that might be true for sort of the civil effects of marriage, but the court or the state of Indiana or whomever does not have the power to dissolve something that is real, something that God has created. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 15:39

So I agree with the statement that marriage is indissoluble except by death. But what I mean by that is pretty different than actually what the Catholics mean by that. It sounds like how could it be different, but it is. So consider this canon. Canon 1143. This is from uh the Catholics here. A marriage entered into by two non-baptized persons is dissolved by means of the Pauline privilege in favor of faith of the party who has received baptism by the very fact that a new marriage is contracted by the same party, provided that the non-baptized party departs. Let me explain what that means. You have two people not baptized, one of them becomes a Catholic, then they get divorced. Now, the Catholic goes to marry another Catholic. That new remarriage will dissolve the first marriage, according to the Catholics. Now, I would say that remarriage is a continual state of adultery, it's an invalid marriage, it's a continual state of adultery, but they would say that first marriage was dissolved and the second marriage is legit. So here's the problem. But the canon says it is dissoluble. Wait a minute, wait a minute. How is it indissoluble and yet dissoluble? So here's what Pius XII wrote. Uh, a ratified and consummated marriage is by divine law indissoluble, since it cannot be dissolved by any human authority. While other marriages, although intrinsically indissoluble, still do not have an absolute extrinsic indissolubility, but under certain necessary conditions, can uh it it is a question, as everyone knows, of relatively rare cases, be dissolved not only by virtue of the Pauline privilege, but also by the Roman pontiff in virtue of his ministerial power. So that's referring to the petrin privilege. And we'll talk about that more in the next uh episode or talk about that. But I just want to bring it up here because they've turned the word indissoluble onto something that doesn't mean what you think it means. What you need to find out is not whether or not they think all marriages are indissoluble, but whether they think they think all marriages are literally unable to be dissolved. I know it sounds like the same thing, but it is not the same thing. So to answer that, the answer to that question is no, not all marriages are unable to be dissolved. A sacramental marriage is unable to be dissolved in their view, but a natural marriage is able to be dissolved under certain circumstances. So this is a major distinction in between my view and the Catholic view. I don't think any marriages are sacramental, and I don't think any valid marriages are able to be dissolved. So I bring this up because a moment ago he said all marriages are natural marriages, except when Christ came, he he raised the elevated marriages, but this elevated state only works for, you know, two believers who get married, two baptized people who get married. And so he elevated marriage. And so people think, well, the Catholics have the highest view of marriage. No, they do not. No, they do not, because they think natural marriages can be dissolved under certain circumstances. And I do not think they can be dissolved. It is indissoluble other than death, can't dissolve it. I think marriage is literally indissoluble, not intrinsically this and extrinsically, no, no. It's indissoluble by like the dictionary definition, actually unable to be dissolved.

SPEAKER_02 19:18

Okay. Okay, now what does this mean then when these two people are baptized people? It means that a sacramental bond is created. So not only is there a bond uh created between their souls, if you will, uh, this is how I like to image it. This is how I use it in homilies. It's as if it's not as if it is that the Lord Jesus, the grace of the Lord Jesus, becomes the wrapping around that bond. Now, that's just an image, and maybe that's not theologically precise, it's just an image. But what is theologically precise is that when two baptized people get married, that the grace of the Lord Jesus flows through that bond.

SPEAKER_01 20:01

Okay, this is a very, very smooth way of saying this because it sounds like the bond is the same, whether it's a natural bond or a sacramental bond. But we just talked about how it cannot be the same because a natural bond is dissoluble and a sacramental bond is actually indissoluble, like unable to be dissolved in the Catholic view. But but if you listen to what he just said there, it made it sound like it's exactly the same bond. It's just the natural bond is just kind of wrapped around and the grace is flung. It's like super smooth, but just kind of leaves out the fact that basically you took an elevator. You were you were at the first floor, natural bond, still it's dissolvable under certain circumstances, and you just went up one floor and it's a it's a different kind of thing, not just it's a supercharge of the same thing, it's a different kind of thing because one can be dissolved and the other one cannot.

SPEAKER_02 21:01

Such that the spouses now experience the Lord Jesus in a way that they didn't before, through each other, through their life together. Okay. So, in other words, God communicates himself through uh the marital bond.

SPEAKER_01 21:26

In God's A lot of evangelicals will say, Well, I don't agree with this sacramental bond thing with the Catholic Church. And you know, I understand. As Protestants, it's part of our brand to be anti-Catholic. I I get it. We it's the whole Reformation, it's been in our blood for a long time, a lot of rhetoric back in the day, and we're we're still kind of just repeating it. We're still kind of doing it. And there are things to criticize of the Catholic Church, no quick, no question about it. But a lot of Protestants actually hold a very similar kind of view. They wouldn't, they won't call it a sacrament, but they will say, because they'll look at 1 Corinthians chapter 7. In verse 15, and say, well, if the unbelieving depart, then the believer is free to be able to go ahead and remarry. And so they don't say it this way, but it's a necessary conclusion that they believe in higher and lesser marriages, because a marriage where one of them is a believer, they think can be dissolved for this other exception. And the marriages where they're both believers can't be. So they have to say that there's a higher and lesser marriage thing going on there in 1 Corinthians 7.15, which I don't agree with that view at all. I have other videos about that. But I just wanted to mention a lot of Protestants, evangelicals will say, Oh, we don't think it's a sacrament. How could you possibly think it's a sacrament? All these Catholics, right? Okay. And then you turn them over to 1 Corinthians 7.15, and they have a similar kind of higher and lesser marriage kind of view. Now just think just think about how complicated that is with the stratification of marriage types based on who married who and when they married them and all that kind of stuff. There's just no way that we're supposed to have this complicated construct from the language in 1 Corinthians 7.15. Anyways, we'll continue.

SPEAKER_02 22:56

Wisdom, as I mentioned before, that marriage demands this unity. So, in other words, you know, you can't enter into marriage and then you know want to carry on a fling with somebody else at the same time. Uh that goes against what marriage is, to do that, uh, or to think that marriage should be that way. Uh it demands, well, I'm sorry, that was fidelity. Unity would be that you can't just, you know, go in and out of marriage. Uh I have it in the other way on my notes, that's why I mixed it up. Uh, you can't just go in and out of marriage, you know, willy-nilly. So it marriage wouldn't be marriage if it were open to, you know, leaving when you felt like it, or you know, whatever it might be, it wouldn't really uh wouldn't really be marriage. Okay. So an interesting thing about that, if it's two non-baptized people, or if it's one non-baptized person and a baptized person, it is still a natural bond, not sacramental. It takes both parties have to be baptized for it to be sacramental. Now, this is a great thing about this. Uh, my sister married a non-baptized person. She's Catholic, non-baptized, not the one that had the baby. This is my other sister. He became a Catholic uh almost a year after their marriage. And as soon as he was baptized, boom, their marriage became sacramental. So as soon as you have the two baptized people, then the sacrament is bestowed on the married people, uh, which I think is really, really cool. That that just happens. Correct. Any baptized people, any validly baptized people, two Baptists, two Methodists, a Catholic and a Methodist, for sure. Okay?

unknown 24:39

Trinitarian.

SPEAKER_02 24:40

Trinitarian baptism. Trinitarian baptism, yeah. Valid valid Christian baptism. Now, the reason this is, I need to set this up for you is in order to understand annulments, you know, we have to know what the lay of the land here is. We have to know what marriage is. When two people get married, the church presumes that this happens. Okay, that's the presumption of the church. That that the bond happens. You know, they said the words and that they mean the words. So the presumption of the church is that this happened. And if everything is in place, then it does happen.

SPEAKER_01 25:20

Why does he say presume? It's kind of a strange term. I now presume you husband and wife. No, I don't pronounce you husband and wife, but that presume, right? So why are they presuming that they're married? Why can't we know that they're married? They consented during the wedding. They went through the ceremony. All these people came and they gave gifts. Are Catholics who are married unable to know if they're married? Uh, they go through their whole life presuming that they're married. The reason they say they they have to presume and that they do not really know that they're married, is because they have to have subjective requirements for the marriage. So there could be a lack of some subjective requirement that he'll talk about here in a moment. And it's difficult to identify at the time of the wedding that there was a subjective requirement that was not met. So it's possible they're look married, but they're not married. I can't entirely disagree with the idea of presumption. It's possible that the bride was threatened. That's possible, pretty unlikely. When she consents, she consents under duress. And it's not real consent then, right? And so that's possible, but it's a pretty remote possibility. When the chances of those things happening are like vanishingly small, I think you can say that you know the marriage happened. You don't have to say, Oh, you know, I'm presuming that this person, my the real spouse wasn't abducted and I married an alien. You know, I mean, yeah, okay, beyond a reasonable doubt here, which is what we're talking about. But that's not the situation with Catholics. So that's that'd be my situation because you have to have an absence of consent or something like that before you can say that the marriage didn't actually happen. But with the Catholics, they think that many marriages are, if fully analyzed through their process, invalid. And so uh these days there's roughly 20,000 annulments each year in the US. And it used to be higher, actually. It's kind of come down. But only 26% of divorced Catholics in America even seek an annulment. So if like suppose 100% of divorced American Catholics sought an annulment, the number of annulments each year would be like much higher than like 20,000. I think most American Catholics know somebody who has had an annulment. Uh, and I believe, you know, every or nearly every diocese has trained staff to process annulment requests. I think that just tells you the Catholic view is such that the chances of the seemingly valid marriage is actually invalid are high enough that you can't say it's a vanishingly small chance. There's actually a decent chance the marriage is invalid. And so therefore they cannot know that they're married. They have that's hence why they have to presume that they're married. So now I would say this if two Catholics get married according to their own rules and all that stuff, and there aren't a bunch of issues, at some point the chances of invalidity become vanishingly small uh so that they can go from like a presumption of marriage, and I would argue they could know they're married. But I but in practice, Catholics, I would say, when they first get married, cannot know that they're married according to their own theology for quite some time after they've they've been married. So if you ask Catholic newlyweds if they're married, they shouldn't say yes, they should say, I hope so.

SPEAKER_02 28:38

But it's possible that there's something missing that even though it seemed like a marriage took place, it was later discovered that it wasn't. And when we talk about marriage nullity, that's what we're asking the question about. Was there something that was missing that made the marriage, even though it seemed like it was a true marriage, not a true marriage? There's a few, let's see if I have an eraser here. There's a few things to look at when we're asking this question. The first thing that we ask in the tribunal is called form. So the form is basically the celebration of the marriage. And just like the state of Indiana would say, you know, in order for you to validly enter a civil marriage, you have to have a marriage license, a licensed minister, and two witnesses. Okay, the state of Indiana says that. If you don't have those things, you know, if you just went out in the woods with your fiance and said your vows, the state of Indiana would say what? You're not married. Okay? The church says the same thing, that there has to be a certain form in which people get married in order for it to be a valid marriage. So the form for Catholics, if one of the parties is Catholic, is this. They have to have an authorized minister, so a bishop, priest, or deacon generally, who has the authority to witness the wedding. There has to be two witnesses, and there has to be a public exchange of consent, so basically public vows. So those are the things that are necessary for Catholic form in order for the marriage to be valid. If any one of these things is missing, then there's no marriage. The bond over here doesn't take place. So what would be some scenarios that that would be the case? Well, let's say that two Catholics didn't go to an authorized minister, a cat a bishop, priest, or deacon, but rather they went down to the justice of the peace at the Allen County Courthouse and they exchanged their vows. What would it be, valid or invalid? Not valid, it would be invalid, right? Because an authorized minister would have been missing, because the justice of the peace in the Allen County Courthouse isn't an authorized minister according to the Catholic Church. So in the tribunal, we have a number of cases of folks that maybe married outside the church, then divorced, and they're able to just put in their paperwork to show us that they're a Catholic and that they weren't married in the Catholic Church. And that's a very simple process.

SPEAKER_01 31:29

That case that he gave where somebody went down to the justice of the peace and got married, I would say that's a valid marriage. And so this is a big deal. In cases where he would say it's an invalid marriage, and they would go through the process to get a declaration of nullity and annulment. After they got that declaration of nullity, the Catholic Church is saying, you're free to go ahead and remarry. But I would say, no, they're not, because that was a valid marriage. Your declaration of nullity is wrong. And so then if they got into a remarriage, the Catholics would say, Well, that's a valid marriage. You need to stay in that. And I would say that remarriage is a continual state of adultery. You need to leave that. So determining the requirements for a marriage, what makes a valid marriage, is kind of a big deal. Because if you get that wrong, you're going to declare a marriage null, void, you're going to annul the marriage, and then uh give people permission to remarry. And if you get it wrong, you've given people permission to commit adultery for the rest of their life with this other person, which can cost their soul. It's a high-stakes question under what conditions a marriage is invalid. So I would say what you have to have uh for people to get married are you have to have a man and a woman, they have to consent, they have to have uh it doesn't have to be public necessarily. He said public on his whiteboard. Uh it doesn't have to have to be vows. And he said consent, and he said basically vows. So I think they just only require consent. I don't think they actually require vows. And I agree with that. I don't think you technically need vows. Vows are great, but I don't think you need them. So yeah, man and woman, consent, um, approval from the civil authority is what I think you need. I don't think you need approval from a minister. I don't think you need a religious person to do that. In the Old Testament, in in Genesis, they didn't have a minister. And that was those were marriages. Can't be that you need a minister today. I do think you need approval from the civil authority. So, what if you don't have a civil authority? What if you're, or what if the civil authority won't let you enter into a marriage that um God would say is permissible for you to enter into? Well, what you can do is you can go down to a lower level of civil authority. So you have to understand the way humanity works is we're social creatures, right? We grow up in families, we take a long time to grow up. And so we have a family, and you have the head of the household, right? And then we typically we go into tribes, uh, and then eventually we go to city-states and then like nation states. This is the level that we're at uh at this point. Well, if the nation state won't say yes, or the nation state was like, we're not handling marriages. You guys just go ahead and do whatever you want, then you just need a lower level of uh civil authority, kind of a substitute for civil authority, and so you could use your church, for example, in that case as kind of a substitute, but only if you know you couldn't do it through the normal civil authority that God has appointed in your particular location. Um, and it can't be incestuous and it can't be an adulterous remarriage. Also, I don't think you need like a form or a celebration or an event or whatever. A marriage is entered into once all of the necessary elements are present and then a person is married. And now let me give you a situation where this is kind of a big deal. Suppose somebody is divorced and they're remarried, and the remarriage is an invalid, adulterous remarriage. Well, it's going to be an adulterous remarriage their whole life, and then they're gonna they're gonna die, right? And then they're not gonna make it to heaven. Well, let's say five years into their remarriage, their first spouse passes away. Well, now that the first spouse has passed away, there's nobody for them to commit adultery against anymore. That was the problem. The reason why the marriage was invalid was their first spouse was alive. But if the first spouse isn't alive anymore, then that invalidating trait is no longer there. So then at the death of the first spouse, this new marriage becomes valid because all you need is a moment in time where all of the necessary traits for a valid marriage uh are there. And once you have that, boom, now you have a valid marriage. Well, you have that in this case I just gave you after the first spouse dies. Under this view, from the Catholic view, I think he would say you had to have to have another marriage. I think. I don't actually know. I'd have to ask him that question, but he said you have to have a form. Well, there's no form after the first spouse died. The form occurred, you know, while the first spouse was still alive. So does he think you have to have a ceremony afterward and witnesses and do the minister? You have to do all of that stuff. What would be the need for all of that? So that seems like kind of an odd view. And so it these things do really matter under what conditions uh a marriage is valid.

SPEAKER_02 35:56

Once we get all the papers we need, it literally only takes us two days to process that, and then they're free if they're looking to enter into another marriage. Now, where this gets confusing is that although the Catholic Church requires, if it's if there's at least one Catholic in the marriage, for there to be an authorized minister, if it's not a Catholic marriage, say it's two Methodists or two Jewish people, or you know, a Muslim and a Methodist, the Catholic Church does not require an authorized minister for as far as form goes. So all they need to do is have two witnesses with public vows. So as far as form goes, the Catholic Church would say, you know, marriages that take place outside of the Catholic Church between non-Catholics are valid. You know, two Methodists get married in the Methodist Church. As far as form goes, the Catholic Church would say, yeah, that's that's a valid marriage. And this is where there's a lot of confusion because with the annulments, because you could get Catholics that get married outside the church and get a so-called quickie annulment, but then you have two Methodists and let's say they divorce, and then one of them wants to marry a Catholic and they have to go through the full process. To some people, that doesn't make sense to everybody. Do you see what I'm doing at? But it's a matter of asking this question about form and whether form is um the form is valid. Okay, so that's one thing that we look at, and that's actually sort of the easiest thing. There's another thing that we look at called impediments. So that's the first thing. The second thing is impediments, and these are uh certain things about the person or the situation of the person that makes it so that they're not able to enter into marriage. Now, I'm not gonna go through the whole list of them for you because it's pretty long and we're sort of on a uh short schedule tonight, but let me just give you a few highlights uh of impediments.

SPEAKER_01 37:52

So one of them is, and this is easy to understand, he's gonna talk about various impediments to uh a valid marriage. He's gonna get talk about age and abduction and holy orders and incest, but there are some other ones that he doesn't uh refer to. One of them is in canon 1086, and it says a marriage between two persons, one of whom is baptized in the Catholic Church or received into it, and the other one of whom is not baptized, is invalid. And this is similar but a little different from the Orthodox view of a believer marrying a non-believer. They're a little bit more strict. Uh, they would call more marriages invalid than the Catholic Church would under canon 1086. So that's kind of interesting. Here's another one, 1085. A person bound by the bond of a prior marriage, even if it was not consummated, invalidly attempts marriage. And that is interesting because uh that makes it sound like a marriage that is not consummated is a valid marriage, right? Because if somebody who's entered into a marriage, even if it's not been consummated, uh, is unable to get into a remarriage there. Uh, and there is another canon later on that we'll talk about, I think, in the next episode, where a unconsummated marriage can be dissolved. And the word dissolved is interesting because they mean they that must mean they think that um the marriage is valid, though not consummated. And then canon 1090 says anyone who, with a view to entering a marriage with a certain person, has brought about the death of that person's spouse or of one's own spouse invalidly attempts the marriage. If somebody kills their spouse or whatever, with a view of getting into a remarriage, they would call that invalid. Uh, I technically don't agree with that. I understand the reason for the rule, but I don't think there's anything in the scripture that gives us that. And there's canon 1093, the impediment of public propriety arises from an invalid marriage after the establishment of common life or from notorious or public concupinage. It nullifies marriage in the first degree of the direct line between the man and the blood relatives of the woman, and vice versa. So a man's got a girlfriend, he's living with her or whatever, and then he wants to marry like her sister, and they would call that an invalid marriage. I would say that's not an invalid marriage, um, but that but they say it is.

SPEAKER_02 40:20

Insufficient age. The Catholic Church says that a man has to be at least 16 years old, and a woman has to be at least 14 years old for them to validly marry. So if you have a uh a girl who's 13, she has an impediment to validly marry. She's too young. And if she even if she goes through a marriage ceremony, the marriage would be invalid because she has the impediment of insufficient age. Uh sacred orders is an impediment to marry. So I have an impediment to marry. You know, I could meet a girl, go to Wisconsin, not wear a collar, lie to the priest, go through a ceremony, but I wouldn't be validly married because I have an impediment to marriage. Sacred orders. Uh you'll love this one. There's one called abduction. If a man kidnaps a woman in order to marry her, the marriage is invalid. That's an impediment to marriage. Surprisingly, there's no impediment for when a woman kidnaps a man. These laws uh were written at a time, you know, probably that was maybe a fairly regular occurrence. I don't know, in medieval times or something, where the men were kidnapping the women in order to marry them, but apparently there was no big problem with the other way around. So that's why the law only goes only goes one way. Um let's see. There are there's one called consanguinity. This is uh blood relationships. There are certain, obviously, blood relationships that have impediments. You know, you can never marry in the direct line, so a grandfather can't marry his granddaughter. Uh there's they go sideways too. So in the Catholic Church, it extends out to first cousins. So first cousins can't marry, but below first cousins can marry in the Catholic Church. I think the state of Indiana is second cousins, uh, but in the church it's first cousins, and that even can be dispensed. Um, that probably wouldn't be dispensed very regularly in the Catholic Church, but um, but that is uh an impediment to marriage. Everybody understand that one? Okay. Now, the third one. And this is where most of the work of the tribunal is involved, and this is looking at consent. So consent here means, so I erased it already, but basically the vows. That when a person says their vows, you know, I, John, take you, Mary, to be my wife, I, Mary, take you, John, to be my husband, that's a big thing, obviously. You know, that's a big act. Because a person, when they take their vows, they are defining themselves by that vow for the rest of their life. And that vow has to include what it needs to include because they're saying, I marry you. So that word marry in there means this. Okay? Everything that the church understands that marriage is. So in the tribunal, one of the questions we ask is, was there something missing from their consent that made it so that that they either didn't have the ability to consent to this, or they were pulling something out of this that they're not real that they're not able really allowed to pull out and for it to still be marriage? Okay.

SPEAKER_01 43:44

He highlights an important distinction. So the distinction is this inability to consent compared to somebody who is able to consent, appeared to consent, but like in Internally didn't really consent. So now the second category, I don't think that invalidates a marriage. If you buy a house, but you don't really know what you're signing up for, you still bought the house. Similarly, if you get married and you don't know what you're signing up for, you're still married. So consider Genesis 27. Rebecca tricked Isaac into blessing Jacob by making him think it was Esau. The fact that Isaac didn't intend to bless Jacob doesn't change the fact that he did bless Jacob. Consider Genesis 29. Laban tricked Jacob into marrying Leah. Jacob didn't intend to marry Leah, but he did, and they were still married. Joshua chapter 9, the Gibeonites tricked the Israelites into a treaty. They didn't intend to ally with a group that lived nearby, the Gibeonites, but they did. So these agreements are valid despite a significant lack of knowledge and a significant lack of intent to enter into that kind of agreement or make that kind of a promise or that kind of a blessing. Similarly, if someone gets married today and they didn't know what their role in marriage is, or they knew, but they didn't really intend to fulfill the role in marriage, it's still a marriage. Just because you cross your fingers when you sign a real estate contract, that doesn't invalidate the contract. Same with marriage.

SPEAKER_02 45:28

So let me give you some examples to put some meat on the bones of this. So let's say that a person said, Well, I, John, want to marry you, Susie, but in my heart, I am not open to children. I never want to have children in my marriage. Okay. There's no such thing as marriage without openness to children. It doesn't exist. By definition, marriage includes openness to children. So if a person on their own initiative intends to pull this out on the day that they marry, their vows are invalid because they're saying vows about something that doesn't exist. Follow me on that? Okay. So you can see how this would be possible when I say that there was something missing on the wedding day that that's one of the grounds that somebody pulls something out. So children could be one thing. You know, fidelity could be another thing. You know, on their wedding day, they're saying, Well, yeah, I want to marry Susie, but I really like this fling that I'm having with Cheryl on the side. Okay, you can't go into marriage with that intention. And if you do, you're pulling fidelity out, and then your vows are invalid. Same with unity. Well, I want to hedge my bed. If this doesn't work out, I know that I can dissolve this marriage on my own authority. You can't go into marriage thinking that because marriage doesn't exist that way. You're pulling unity out of that. You can even pull, we've had cases, not very often, but you could even pull the good of the spouses out. Like there could be other reasons that you're marrying and you really don't care for the person, care about the person, wanting to give yourself to the person, want wanting the person to give themselves to you. This, by the way, is called exclusion. That's the canonical ground. You can do this totally too. So, like you go through a wedding ceremony, but in your heart you're saying, I'm not really marrying. So, this is maybe the so-called shotgun weddings. Well, that can kind of come under a different ground, too. But um, so a person goes through it for another reason, but they don't really want to marry, and they're not really choosing to marry, even though their words are saying it. That's called total simulation.

SPEAKER_01 47:36

Okay, so the I didn't mean it argument just doesn't work in my view. Consider if we did this with all agreements, commerce would totally break down. No one would ever know if a contract is enforceable. You know, if things don't go well for somebody, they can go to court and tell the judge, well, I didn't really mean it when I signed the contract. And, you know, knowing that that's a possibility, nobody would ever enter into a contract. You'd buy a car from a private owner, three months later, inflation spikes. The prior owner wants his car back so he can so he can resell it for more. Uh, and so he goes to court and says he didn't mean it. And you know, you reverse the money in the car exchange and then he resells it. Knowing that's a possibility, you have to watch the inflation rate to determine whether or not you own the car. Uh so that's just and that's what this does with with marriage. If the marriage doesn't go well, one spouse can try to figure out a way to invalidate the marriage. And this is just an unworkable way to handle agreements, and we see something very different in scripture.

SPEAKER_02 48:28

Total exclusion. Good on that one? Okay. There are some other grounds too that kind of makes sense. There's one called force and fear. So this vow, this consent that a person makes, has to be a free act for it to be valid. You know, you can't, nobody can force you to make this vow. Uh so, for example, you might have situations where, you know, say you have a 17-year-old girl that gets pregnant, and her dad says, You're gonna marry him, or we will never speak to you again. Okay, that's a type of force and fear that makes it so that that person isn't really validly consenting to the vows that they're saying, and that would invalidate their marriage. Make it make it so that it's not valid. Okay, now let's get into the harder ones.

SPEAKER_01 49:23

I agree that duress removes the ability to consent. So shotgun weddings aren't valid. I won't talk to you again, doesn't like rise to the level of duress. So that's pressure, but it's not, you know, I'm gonna cause death or major bodily injury to you unless you marry the person. That's the kind of thing that would invalidate someone's ability to consent. So therefore, it's not duress, and it doesn't remove the ability to consent just because somebody says if you don't marry them, I'm not gonna talk to you anymore.

SPEAKER_02 49:50

As I said before, saying your vows is a big deal to marriage because marriage defines who you are. You're you're choosing that for the rest of your life. And you have to have the capacity to deliberate about that choice.

unknown 50:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 50:05

So one of the grounds has to do with whether the person really had the capacity to the level that they needed to make this huge decision to marry. Uh it's got kind of a long title. This ground is called grave lack of judgmental discretion. Whoops. Discretion meaning your power to discern. Okay, your power to discern.

SPEAKER_01 50:32

So I agree with this in principle that if a person is unable to consent, any marriage they seem to enter into is invalid.

SPEAKER_02 50:42

So uh let me give you another stick figure here. So our understanding uh as the church of how we work as a human person is basically that we have our senses, of course, and it is through the senses that we take in, you know, the outside world. That information from the senses goes to our intellect, our power to think, reason. The intellect, you know, can think about those things, can ponder the things that come in from the senses. And then we have another part of us, our will, and the will is the power that God has given us to choose. So from the intellect, you know, the will looks at what what the intellect gives it and it chooses freely among choices. We do this a thousand times a day, right? We walk by the ice cream stand, so our our senses take in the sight of an ice cream cone, you know, sends it to our intellect. Our intellect remembers the last time we had ice cream, and oh boy, that was good, but then starts to think I'm starting to gain a little weight, maybe I should pass on it, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then our will decides from that palette of choices what it's gonna do. Oh, I really like ice cream. Forget the scale, I'm gonna have the cone, right? So we choose to do it. We do this a thousand times a day.

SPEAKER_01 52:13

Now, you can tell these are these Catholics, these are smart people uh who have thought this stuff through kind of at a deep level, and he has arguments for each position. They're clear, they're understandable, and most of them are pretty logical. Um, now you can see why this guy was a you know professor at Notre Dame. And as evangelicals, I would say we need to the ability to break things down like this. What I see in evangelicalism for the most part is not this. And so we just kind of need to retrain ourselves. We shouldn't be mealy-mouthed. You know, don't practice the art of almost saying something, uh, stick out a position and then like defend it. Uh, we should not argue that a person is unable to see the truth because they have bad motives or whatever. We should not use tactics that like block reasoning, like elevating the pressure and anxiety of the people to whom you're talking about, or God just told me this thing that I need to tell you right now, or that might be logical, but it's not theological. And everybody's just confused. What does that even mean? You know, phrases like this are just not just unhelpful. You know, just like warning people constantly, or like doing appeals to authority, like you need to listen to your pastor. Don't make an argument, syllogism, you know, premise, deduction, conclusion. And, you know, authority is not a substitute for reason. And also we need to be able to reason better than we do. We need the ability to identify when an argument is a non-sequitur, when the can when you have a premise and you have a conclusion, but the conclusion has does not follow from the premise. We should not rely on the argument that we live in the tension between this and that, and then we're unable to deduce anything. That's just an observation. It's not an argument. Or we live in the tension. Okay, great. What am I supposed to do with that? You need to give me an argument. And finally, we should work on our words. You know, in in chess, they have a saying that the difference between a good player and like a grandmaster is the good player sees a good move and plays it. A grandmaster sees a good move and looks for a better one and then plays the better move. We need to do that with our words. So we can find a good word to describe what we're talking about, not just hold back, wait a minute, challenge that word. Could that word be misunderstood? Is it specific and precise enough to even qualify as a useful word? A word often implies a distinction, but is that the right distinction to even make? I can tell from watching our Catholic friend here that he's articulating terms that have been studied over and refined, and we need to do that as well. So while I don't agree with all my Catholic friends on all the on all the things, I appreciate clear and understandable presentation. So let's continue.

SPEAKER_02 54:44

Now, with marriage, this process has to happen. But again, with marriage, it's not like choosing an ice cream comb. Okay, that's a little small choice. Choosing marriage is a big deal. So this process has to work sufficiently for the marriage to be valid. You have to be able to discern what you're really doing. And it's possible in people that this process doesn't work well enough for them to discern the big choice to marry. A lot of times that's because a person might be uh afflicted with some sort of mental anomaly, a psychological anomaly, uh, you know, severe depression that's chronic, you know, the typical ones, say schizophrenia or bipolar, whatever it might be. And if it's determined, that doesn't, by the way, that doesn't mean that people who suffer from those things can't marry. It means that some people who suffer from those things aren't able to discern the choice to marry. And so that's one of the things that the church, the tribunal would be looking at in this ground is were they not able to discern what they were doing? And some of these things could be inflicted situationally. Okay, so it might not be something that is like a long-standing and chronic disorder that a person has. But again, you know, maybe one of those typical situations where you've got a, you know, say you've got a girl who was abused anyway in her home, uh, she gets pregnant, and she she feels no other avenue but to choose marriage. You see, she's not able, because of her psychological situation, to discern through what she was doing. So, in other words, whatever that situation was compromised what she should have been able to do freely, but she couldn't do.

SPEAKER_01 56:32

So, you know, there's going to be two impulses, I think, that are going to come from this for evangelicals. The first is that, yes, people are sometimes unable to consent due to something going on in their brain. So if someone experiences a severe physical brain injury, for example, if someone has dementia or Alzheimer's, their ability could be compromised. And he mentions some other afflictions like that. The second impulse is that since it's hard to know exactly when or if somebody has this affliction when they consent to be married, it's hard to determine validity. So people are going to wonder wait a minute, wait a minute, is this like an loophole? Is this going to be an out? What are we, what are we going to do about this? And that might make people a little concerned. But I don't think we need to worry as much about that second impulse because suppose someone has difficulty like this, but it's episodic, uh, it comes and goes. Well, when they are clear thinking, if they still consent to the marriage, there's no invalidity. So our Catholic friend doesn't view it that way. He thinks if they're unable to consent at the moment of the wedding ceremony, uh when they did their consenting, their vows, then the marriage is invalid. But I think a marriage is valid when all the necessary elements for validity are present. So if on Monday a couple gets married, but consent wasn't present, but then they're, you know, then they're not married on Monday. But if on Tuesday the ability to consent is present and they both choose to continue the marriage, then they're married. So also, when someone is unable to consent, they're going to have other significant problems in their life. And here's why to establish that a person has the inability to consent, it's not sufficient to find that they are clinically depressed or experienced real trauma. You know, just as a depression diagnosis or therapeutic recognition of trauma doesn't render a person unable to sign like a business contract. So it doesn't render a person unable to be married. You need to be able to establish that their reasoning function is substantially impaired. Not that their mood or their anxiety levels are dysregulated or that they get triggered by certain things that remind them of past trauma. Um, also, it's not just that they come to bad conclusions or that they believe wrong things or their IQ is, I don't know, below average or whatever. We're talking about inability to consent. So think of like a dementia patient who sincerely thinks it's like the year 1965. That's what we're talking about here, disconnected from reality. Um, in other afflictions, this will look like someone who is like drunk or they're like high on drugs. And that can happen because of something in the brain not working the way it's supposed to. You know, we're we had the fall, Adam and Eve had the fall, and it affected uh many things, sicknesses, and the brain didn't escape from that. So people do have some afflictions in that in that area. So, I mean, some of these things could be like they're just naturally occurring hallucinations, and those hallucinations can be visual or auditory or in their reason, and they call those delusions. There's there is a problem with the brain that makes them unable to consent. But these are people who are just like clearly not in touch with reality. They're people who could qualify, for example, for power of attorney under the law. So I agree a variety of disorders make it hard for people to make good decisions and they deserve our empathy and our help. And depression and trauma and all of those things deserve our kindness to 100%. But that doesn't qualify them for like power of attorney, for example. And so that means they are still legally capable of signing a contract and buying a house and buying a car. And so also they're able to consent to marriage.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:11

Most of the grounds that we look at at the tribunal uh are the are this one, most of the cases rather that we look at a tribunal come under this ground. And that's what we're looking at is if the if the person was able to do this. One final ground that I want to mention, sure, go ahead. She was asking what happens if one of the parties or both, talking about exclusion of children, says, I'm gonna determine if and when we are open to children. Okay, so maybe it's not necessarily that they're not open to children, but they're gonna determine when they're open to children. That's actually still exclusion of children because what really is being exchanged here is not the right to children, because no one has a right to children, children are a gift from God. What is being exchanged here is the right to the sexual act, which is open to children. Okay, so if one of the parties says I'm in control of that right, okay, so just like my car example here with sister, sister and I are in a contract, and I have to give her the keys, the car, and the title, she has to give me the money. She gives me the money, and I give her the keys in the car, but I keep the title, right? I'm in control of the car still. It's an invalid contract. I haven't fulfilled the contract. So the same thing with children. If one of them says, Yeah, I'm open to children, but I'm gonna decide, then they really haven't exchanged the right to be open to children, and so the marriage would be invalid. Excellent question. Okay, one final ground. It's called the this is a mouthful too, so I'm sorry about this, but it's called the inability to assume the essential obligations of marriage due to a psychic cause. Ever since Apple, I got the iPhone, I can't spell anymore. How do you spell psychic? I don't know. Thanks. I don't know. Okay, you know. All right, because the phone does it for me now, I don't have to do it anymore. Okay. So what this one means is that because of a psychic cause, okay, some of those things maybe I mentioned before, severe chronic depression, uh, you know, schizophrenia, bipolar, it could be severe alcoholism or something like that. Rooted in a psychic cause, the person is not able to do what married people do. And what do married people do? They're faithful to one another, they're able to live in a permanent union, they live for the good of the spouses, they're able to engage in the procreation and education of children. If, because of a psychic cause, a person is not able to do what they're promising to do, the marriage is invalid. So let's go back to sister and I with the car here. So I give her the keys, the car, and the title, she gives me the $13,000. We have a contract, right? We exchange the contract. What if she only has eleven thousand dollars?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:22

No contract. His analogy actually disproved his point. So if you sign a contract with someone to buy your car, whether they have the money or not, it's a legally binding contract. You can sue them to perform, you can sue them to pay you, in this case, the other $2,000. Now, if somebody marries but they don't intend to do it to do the things that marriage requires or whatever, they're still married.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:48

So by analogy, you know, if a person, I'll give you an example. Say a person is a severe alcoholic on the day they married, they they cannot help but go to the bar almost every night and over-drink. And that overdrinking usually always leads to some sexual contact with some other person. Okay, and that is chronic, ingrained. Okay. The the church could determine they could promise fidelity on the day of their wedding, but they don't have the capacity to do what they're promising. And you can't promise something that you can't do. So the marriage is invalid. That's just one example.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:27

Um so, yes, people can make promises to do things that they can't do. So now if their if their ability to reason is impaired sufficiently, you could say they didn't actually promise anything because they can't, because their reasoning ability is not there, you have to be able to reason and think in order to be able to consent. But if the person was not impaired, when they consented, and they can promise something and then not be able to do it, they still promised it. So if the person is drunk when they consented to marriage, and when they sober up, they realize they don't want to be married, that could be annulled because their mirror their ability to consent was impaired when they were drunk. But if when they're sober, they consented, they consented, that's a marriage.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:17

But that would be an example of this one here. By the way, when we look at marriage nullity, especially when we're talking about consent, we are talking about the day of consent. So what their ability was, what their intention was on the day of the marriage. What comes after the day of the marriage might shed light on what their ability was on the day of the marriage. Okay, so like I say, the infidelity of the alcoholic, you know, five, you know, for three or four or five years after the marriage sheds light on their incapacity on the day of the marriage. But what happens after the marriage does not. Validate a marriage if it was truly valid on the day of marriage. Okay. So for example, let's say you've got two people who you know are able to discern, they're able to do what married people do, they have all the right intentions, they enter into marriage, and it's a valid marriage, and then eight years down the road, one of them screws up and has an affair. Okay, that doesn't invalidate the marriage, right? Because the marriage is valid from the start, or it's not. So sometimes this is a point of confusion for people. So that's why when people ask me, like, does invalidity invalidate marriage? The answer is it depends.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:41

See it what he meant to say was, does adultery or infidelity invalidate marriage? He says it depends. And he'll explain what he means by that here in a second.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:51

It depends. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Okay, sometimes the invalid uh infidelity is a sign of an incapacity, and sometimes it's not. Okay, now we don't have a whole lot of time. Uh and the the process itself uh would take me another half hour to explain. So let me just hit the highlights for you. Uh again, unfortunately, when divorce happens, marital life has broken down. Uh many times people who either want to be free to marry someone else, or they have a sense that one of these reasons for invalidity uh took place. They want to petition to the tribunal to ask the church to investigate this question. Even though my marriage seemed to be valid, can it be proved that it actually wasn't valid? A key thing for this, as I mentioned before, is the presumption by the church that when two people marry, it's a valid marriage. So, like in criminal court, you're innocent until proved guilty. In church court, the marriage is valid until it's proved invalid. And that's the key thing for those who are, say, applying for an annulment, is that they have to be able to come up with the proof. When I say proof, I mean like their own testimony, witness testimony. You know, they have to be able to name witnesses who could testify to how their relationship was, maybe how their growing up was, whatever it might be. Uh, in some cases, like you could see how under um these kind of headings that the tribunal would ask have to ask them to provide as evidence psychological reports, or sometimes we have to ask the people to go to one of our psychologists for an evaluation. Uh sometimes that one is a little sensitive for people, and they kind of they kind of you know bristle at having to do that. But I hope you can see from my explanation why for the tribunal, for the judge, that kind of information would be absolutely necessary. So, you know, we don't ask people to do that just because we want them to go through this, you know, kind of examination, but because we need that information in order to determine these kind of things.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:10

So I don't think we need a presumption of validity. The the Catholics do because there's a number of complex subjective elements that they're considering, but we don't have that. You know, they've got a bunch of staff and court processes. All we need is a finding of fact. Now, that finding a fact is gonna end up starting with a presumption of validity anyway, just because that's what the facts point to. Two people, it's a man and a woman. They got in a marriage, they signed the marriage certificate, they consented. Looks like a marriage, right? So now if somebody wants to say it's not a marriage, now you're gonna have to give provide some additional uh evidence for that, and that's gonna be challenging to do. So, I mean, because of the information that we've already got. So, and normally this is gonna be pretty easy. I mean, any pastor I think could do it with you know, using these uh requirements for validity that I've laid out. Um, if the person claims they were unable to consent, it needed to be some kind of medical diagnosis or something uh to show that show they're unable to consent. If the person says their marriage is a remarriage, and then you just need to prove the marriage, divorce, and like the death records of all the people who were involved, and then you just kind of make the proper deductions to figure out uh if the marriage was valid or not. So this is not really that kind of complicated. We uh that you don't need all of this extra bureaucratic infrastructure to determine this. This is just going to be a pretty rare circumstance. The most common circumstance is gonna be an adulterous remarriage.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:32

You know, you know, I as a judge, I'm not an expert in psychology. You know, so we need an expert to inform the judge, yeah, there was schizophrenia or there was bipolar in this person, and this is how it affected them. Okay, the other party uh has the chance to participate. This is a little sticking point sometimes for people too, because uh both, since both parties were parties to the marriage, they both have rights under church law. You know, they have a right to tell their side of the story, uh, for example. So sometimes when people petition, they don't want the other, the ex-spouse, if you will, to be contacted or to have anything to do with this. But we're not allowed to do that under church law. We have to allow them to participate because it is their right to. Um now, the party themselves, they never have to contact them. That all goes from the tribunal, you know, to contact them. Once the evidence is collected, then there is a series of arguments that are put forward. There's a person called the advocate who is on the side of the person petitioning or on the side of the ex spouse. So it's sort of like their church lawyer, if you will. There's a person called the defender of the bond, who is the devil's advocate throughout the whole process. They're always arguing why the annulment shouldn't be granted. Uh and so when it comes time for the arguments, they write briefs. So the one advocate might write, this is why the case is proved, the invalidity is proved, and the defender of the bond would say, Well, this is why it isn't. So then the judge gets all that. The judge gets, you know, all the testimony, all the evidence, the arguments, and then according to the law of the church and the jurisprudence of the church, uh, the judge makes a decision whether it is proved that the marriage was invalid based on whatever grounds uh was chosen. The judge has to have, in order to declare marriage invalid, he has to have what's called moral certitude. Now, moral certitude isn't absolute certitude because we can be absolutely certain about relatively few things. Moral certitude is that given the evidence that has been presented to me, and standing with my conscience only before Almighty God, I can say that it has been proved that this marriage is invalid. And that's how serious of a thing the judge has. Uh, you know, standing before Almighty God, I'm saying on my conscience that I believe that this marriage is invalid given the proof that has been presented to me. So you can see why a judge, you know, he might feel sorry for the parties, you know, he might read about all the pain that the person was put through in the marriage. Um, it might be the case of someone who is trying to come back to the Catholic Church, and we want that to happen, of course. And all those things are certainly valid and important spiritual things, but those are not things that the judge can take into consideration because the only thing before his eyes when he judges a marriage nullity case is is it proved to be invalid? And that's what he's responsible to before Almighty God. Sometimes it keeps us up at night, you know, weighing whether we can come to this moral certitude given a certain case. So I say that to um dispel sometimes people feel like the judge is saying things like, He's saying I'm not worthy to be a Catholic. No, it has nothing to do with that. Or he's saying that the pain I went through doesn't matter. The judge is not saying that. The judge is only answering that one question is the marriage proved to be invalid. Okay. And that's all he's charged to in that situation. You know, that's what the church has given him to determine. That's a lot, isn't it? Yeah, it's a lot all at once. Um, I maybe want to take a few questions about the the Pope's changes to this, but before we do that, maybe we should do general questions. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:44

Before he gets into the general questions, let me just encourage you to go ahead and check out my book, Divorce Your Remarriage. You can get that at Amazon. I have a link to it in the description below. Subscribe, comment as we're going through this. Let me know what your thoughts are and everything. I'll go ahead and respond to those. Like the video, share it, all the things. Let's continue.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:59

Yes, sister.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:01

If you keep using the word invalid, where does the word null come from and why is it called annulment?

SPEAKER_02 1:15:07

Yes. So invalid and null are equivalent. So if you were to say a marriage is null, that would be the same thing as saying a marriage is invalid. Annulment actually is merely a popular term. We don't use the term annulment in church law or in the tribunal. The proper word is marriage nullity. So we're looking for marriage nullity. Yeah. Now you read in the news annulment, and we don't use that because it's confusing. Because when you say the word annulment, it sounds like something was valid and then the church broke it up or made it invalid. That's not what annulment is. So that's why we don't use that word. Say marriage nullity. It's proved to be the marriage proved to be null. If the marriage is declared to be null from the beginning, as you in your example, it would in fact be to say that a sacramental bond never occurred. But even more than that, it would be to say that no bond occurred. This is another frequent point of confusion in the popular media, even among Catholics who talk about this, even among priests, you know, they they don't want to say what you're kind of getting at, like to say that, you know, 60 years of marriage or marital life together, what seemed to be marital life together was for naught. Um, so they say, well, you had a marriage, but you just didn't have a sacramental marriage. No, you didn't you didn't have any marriage in terms of the bond.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:35

All right. So notice that he distinguished between a natural bond and a sacramental bond. He said if the marriage is null, not only is there not a sacramental bond, there is no bond. The you know, a very smooth way he described it earlier, where he's he it seemed as though the natural bond and the sacramental partners like wraps around the natural bond as though it was as though it was just a natural and a sacramental bond are the same thing and they're both indissoluble. But as we saw, they're different bonds. The natural bond is dissoluble under certain circumstances from the Catholic view, and then the sacramental bond is not from the Catholic view. So they are two different types of bonds from their perspective.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:12

Now there might have been affectionate life, there might have been mutual help, but the bond never took place, if it's not. They didn't know. They didn't know. Yeah, I mean, there's no sin there. There's no sin at all. No sin at all, because they were in ignorance.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:29

Okay, so a lady asked about them taking communion when they were in an invalid marriage, and he said that there's no sin because of ignorance. Now I think that's wrong. Jesus called remarriages adultery. First Corinthians chapter six tells us adulterers won't inherit the kingdom of heaven. I agree that ignorance like reduces guilt, but it doesn't eliminate guilt in regards to somebody who's remarried, it's adultery, but like they don't realize it's adultery, it's still adultery and it still prohibits them from entering heaven. So let me give you an example here. Luke chapter 12, verses 47 and 48. This is Jesus. He says, And that servant which knew his Lord's will and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes, but he who knew not and didn't commit things worthy of stripes shall be beaten with few stripes. So here Jesus talks about a man who knew not, total ignorance, knew not, and he'll still be beaten with few stripes. So it's less punishment, but still punishment. Ignorance is not a get out of jail free card. Uh Matthew 15, 14 says, Let them alone. They they be blind leaders of the blind, and if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch. Now the verse says they are blind, total ignorance, and they will fall into the ditch. Uh and by the way, this also means we can't hide behind our church leaders. We can't think to ourselves, well, this thing I'm doing might be wrong, but my church leader said it was okay. So if he is wrong, he'll take the guilt for my sin. No, both fall into the ditch. You follow a blind leader, you fall into the ditch with the leader. So faith and repentance is the way to salvation. Ignorance is not like another path to salvation. Church leaders aren't taking your guilt for you.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:19

Yeah. So his question was what are the top three things that I see people come to the church that maybe caused a divorce or they're looking for annulment? Um I would say the top thing is that there are a number of people who suffer truly from some sort of psychological problem. And I think that the number of people that suffer from a psychological problem continues to grow. And it's related to the breakdown of the family. Um, the effect of divorce on children, you know, I don't want to make anybody feel guilty, that's not why I'm saying this. So if some of you are divorced, please don't take it this way. But what we see in the tribunal is how much that can affect children. The amount of abuse, you would not believe the abuse that we read about sexual abuse, physical abuse, you know, that has a toll on people. And so, and then when they go to enter into marriage, they're they're handicapped by possibly, you know, issues. So I'd say that's the number one thing. And it's more prevalent than you would imagine. The second one is merely uh selfishness, just not knowing how to be humble in marriage, not knowing how to be forgiving. It's basically, again, probably related to the breakdown of the family, also the breakdown of catechesis in the church and evangelization, that people just don't know how to be like Christ. And that, you know, as I say in our vocations, there's nowhere to hide. You know, if we're living a bachelor life, we can kind of hide, you know, but when you are in a vocation, there's nowhere to hide. And those things are gonna affect you, whether you're a married person or a priest or religious. If there's selfishness that you're not willing to let God work on, then that's gonna be a problem. So that would be the number two. I don't know if I can name a number three, but that's that's that's the that's the top two anyway. Sure. So this question is about children being born in a marriage that eventually is declared null. Uh so first of all, the whole thing of legitimacy uh is basically a medieval concept, you know, to determine what property goes to which family and all that. Um, there is still legitimacy in canon law, but it's virtually worthless. I mean, there's no, there's really nothing that says a child is. I mean, there is, but there's no effect to it. But even beyond that, a marriage that seemed like a marriage and then later was declared invalid is called a putative marriage in canon law. And there's a specific canon, so church law says this, that children of a putative marriage are legitimate. So uh a declaration of nullity about a marriage does not illegitimize a child. They're there they stay legitimate.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:20

All right, so I don't think the legitimacy child of a child thing matters or whatever, but what's interesting is they want to have it both ways. It's invalid, but the obvious deductions any rational person would make from the invalidity are disregarded. The sex wasn't sinful. They didn't sin when taking communion while having sex outside of marriage. The kids are legit. So that they take the benefit of the invalidity. Uh, the person can remarry without taking the bitterness of the invalidity uh that they were in sin. So those of us who can't like turn off the logic are like, wait a minute, something doesn't seem right here.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:02

Yeah, so a marriage, say two John and Susie marry, and then 10 years after the marriage, it breaks up, they get divorced, they go to a tribunal, they have three kids in the process, they go to a tribunal, and that the tribunal declares it null. Okay, that it actually didn't exist for whatever reason. The church says that that marriage was putative, in other words, that it seemed like a marriage, and then it was declared null, and that that does not make the three children illegitimate. The law specifically says those three children, even though the marriage was declared null, are legitimate. Whatever that means. It really doesn't mean anything. Yes, okay, good question. So her question is about what if a person was married in the Catholic Church and then divorced? What does that mean in terms for them for the sacraments or whatever it might be? Um, it a little bit it depends, okay. So just by the fact of being divorced doesn't necessarily exclude one from the sacraments, unless the person purposely sought the divorce uh illegitimately. So, in other words, you know, okay, let's say John and Susie. John just says, you know, I don't like living with Susie anymore. I got this other girlfriend, I'm leaving. That's a mortal sin. And like any other mortal sins, you know, and he gets divorced, like any other mortal sins, unless until there's repentance, that bars one from the sacraments. Now, Susie, who was abandoned, okay, there's no sin on her part. She is still free to receive the sacraments. The problem comes is if Susie then seeks to marry someone outside the church, so she enters into a situation where even though the state might say she's married, she's not really married, because you can't be married to two people at the same time. Remember what we said about the bond. You know, the bond between John and Susie exists. It's like the sun in the sky, even though the state says it doesn't. And then when Susie tries to marry Keith civilly, you know, they're they're entering into adultery. So that that would bar them from the sacraments. Just like again, like any other grave sin would bar any Catholic from the sacraments. Now, in those cases where, you know, um maybe it's like marital life just broke down. It wasn't either one's fault necessarily. Um, I would say generally that would not keep one from the sacraments, but that's something that would have to be talked about on the person's conscience with their confessor, maybe, you know, those those ones that maybe aren't as clear cut.

unknown 1:25:47

Before she dies, how she is going to die.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:49

Yeah. You mean if she's married to Keith now? Or yeah. Well, if she's repentant, she certainly can. You know, repentance always opens the way to the sacraments. Well, not necessarily, because we don't care about the civil divorce anyway. So what has to be said by her um is that I repent of you know not living as Christ wanted me to, as far as marriage goes, I repent of that. Uh and I will not live like that anymore in terms of sexual relations, especially. And that's a repentance. They could receive confession and go to communion. And in fact, there are a number of situations, more than you would expect, actually, where, especially if you got older folks in that situation where Susie's married to Keith, you know, and let's say Keith gets cancer or something, they're not gonna engage as husband and wife any longer because of their age and the illness, and they realize that they need to repent, and they do, and they promise to live as brother and sister for the rest of their life. The sacraments are open to them.

unknown 1:26:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:56

Okay, so the scenario here was a woman, there's a woman named Susie, and Susie was married to a guy, it's her first marriage, and that guy left her, went with some other woman. A little time passes by, Susie meets Keith and marries Keith. This is a problem because that's adultery. And he calls it adultery and says that she's still actually married to the first husband, so her relationship with this Keith guy is just adultery, it's an invalid marriage, it's an adulteress remarriage. Totally agree with him there. But then a lady asks him, is Susie required to divorce Keith? And he goes, Well, we don't really care about the status of the civil marriage. That's for the government. We don't care about that. All she needs to do is repent. And what that means is to no longer have sexual intercourse with Keith because then she would not be committing adultery. So this is called a Josephite marriage, is what they call it. And it's based on the incorrect idea that Mary and Joseph never had sex. No. Matthew 1. 25 says that Joseph knew her not until she gave birth to Jesus. So that would tell us that they did have sex. But anyway, I don't want to get off on that tangent. If a man and a woman are in an adulterous remarriage, like Susie and Keith, but instead of divorcing, let's say they just choose to repent and abstain from sex, is that good enough? Because it's not adultery because they're not having sex, right? So I would say this is a great question. I would say it's better than continuing to have sex uh than than not, uh, because then they're not, they can't be committing adultery. Adultery requires a sexual act, right? Somebody dies in a state where they're living in adultery, they can't go to heaven. First Corinthians six, other passages say that as well. Then they're just gonna live together. Well, here's the problem. Do you think it's a good idea for a boyfriend and a girlfriend to live together if they promise to abstain? I don't know of any Christian who thinks that's a good idea, who you know takes their Bible seriously and all that. So, no, it's a so that's a mistake in like every case, right? So, could there be a case for two old people who are caring for each other and can't have sex anyway? That's a closer call. Uh, it's not really plutonic, though. I mean, if a man and a wife were married, and let's say she works as a as a caregiver and she's caring for an older guy and she feels intimate feelings toward him, and she feels warm toward him, and maybe they cuddle or whatever, would that be okay? That wouldn't be okay. She's got a husband at home. We have to be careful not to get kind of lulled into thinking a remarried couple is actually married. They're not married, they're cheating on the first spouse. I'm not comfortable with the Josephite marriage thing. Uh, I don't think it is like the right answer, but it's better than them having sex.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:42

What what about a marriage that say lasts a long time, 20 years, relatively happy for 20 years, and then one of the spouses kind of goes off the rails. Um, maybe is even abusive verbally or otherwise, um, and the one spouse can't really live with them anymore. Okay. There's a lot there because uh every situation is unique. So even in terms of 20 years, it could be a situation of nullity. You you'd think, how can a marriage that lasted 20 years or more be null? But I've had cases where, let's say, okay, poor John and Susie, they're getting our examples tonight, but let's say Susie grew up in a household where her father was very dominant, maybe even abusive. Okay. She becomes very submissive because of this. And she goes into marriage, you know, like a child, submissive. And she lives a long time in the marriage, submissive, not really knowing. You know, she lets her husband dominate over her. And then she goes to a chirp retreat. Okay, this I think of there's cases where this has actually happened. Or she goes on some retreat or pilgrimage or something, and she starts to realize this dynamic that she's been living in is a problem. I mean, she goes to a counselor, they start bringing her out of that. She starts to see and she starts to live as a normal human being again, and he's not gonna live stand for that. Okay, he's I'm in charge, and you do what I say, and that's it. And they break up because of this. So you could see how her consent was invalid. Even though that marital relationship lasted a long time, it lasted a long time because she was so submissive, not because there was, you know, real marriage as the church lays marriage out to be. That the church, the tribunal could determine at the time that she married, she didn't have the capacity for understanding, you know, that he's he's not supposed to dominate over her. It's part of the good of the spouses. Okay, so that's one scenario. Now, another scenario could be that indeed everything was fine between the two of them for 20 years, and then you know, he gets a little dementia or you know, something happens, an accident even or something, and that doesn't make the marriage invalid. Uh, the marriage would still be valid. The church doesn't say, though, that someone has to be abused, so it might be legitimate that they separate for her protection in that instance, might, depending on the circumstances. But when two people marry, you know, I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life. So even though she might not be able to live with him, because she's not, she doesn't have to be abused, the church says, but she can't seek out other marriage because she has to be true to that, that which is true. Okay. So those are two kind of scenarios that depending on the circumstances, that's why we have to look at each case individually.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:53

So, first, if someone is unsafe, they have a right to retreat. The unsafe spouse and children should retreat, call the police, and call their church leaders. So if divorce is necessary for safety, that's also permissible. But they're actually still married in God's eyes. So they can't remarry, but they can be safe and be freed from that difficult relationship in their daily life, and then they're free to serve God, as Paul encourages them to do in 1 Corinthians chapter 7. Second, the question is whether the woman in this example was able to consent uh when she married and going forward from there. Now, his question is was she able to consent at the time of the wedding? That's not my question. My question was at any point in time, you know, going after the wedding, were all of the necessary elements for marriage there? So not just at the point in time when she got married, was she able to consent, but at some point did she agree to stay in this marriage and thereby consent to the marriage? Would her circumstance and the way it impacted her render her unable to reason? Would it make her disconnected from reality and therefore a candidate for like power of attorney? Are there any other agreements that a regular person could enter, but she would be unable to legally enter into? And if the answer is no, and it sounds like the way he described it, the answer to that would be no, then she can and she did consent to marriage. Now, here's here's a caveat. If she is under a constant state of duress, so that she thinks if I don't do X, I will die or suffer major bodily injury, then she isn't consenting. Um, if someone is able to escape a duress situation and chooses not to, they're they're not under duress, right? So in the situation her Catholic friend described here, I didn't hear him say she feared for her life from her husband, or that she claimed she never wanted to marry him, but was threatened to do so. Um, so it sounds like she could have said no, but she didn't. And so there's just a lot of kind of infantilizing language that's being used here. They're trying to take away agency from her to g to justify a declaration of invalidity of the marriage. So, you know, her dad was overly uh aggressive and made her like overly submissive, and then she was kind of transferred to her husband. But obviously, she did have agency because she eventually started to stand up for herself. She started to recalibrate the relationship. Um, and I don't know if that was good or bad, or I don't know enough about it. But all I know is she had agency, which means she consented. If she had enough agency to stand up for her relationship and kind of try to recalibrate the relationship to the point where he got upset, and then she's going through and divorcing, and now we're doing the annulment process and all that stuff. She had agency. She could make decisions. I mean, she could go out and buy a car, right? She could buy a house, right? So if she's under duress and there's nothing wrong with her brain so that she can't consent, then she consented to the marriage. Now that doesn't mean that her husband isn't a jur. Maybe he is a jerk. So, and so we have to be clear, right, about the ability to consent and not like infantilize someone to get the uh outcome that we want.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:58

To an extent, yes. Um, our understanding of grounds like this, grave lack of judgmental discretion, has developed actually more over the last hundred years because honestly, a hundred years ago, we as humans didn't understand psychology like we do now. You know, so they didn't have the tools a hundred years ago or more, um, 200 years ago, to understand, you know, some of these things that could happen. So that's developed recently. But a hundred years ago, if someone excluded children from marriage, yeah, it would have been, it would have been declared no. You can go, I've gone up into the this is what can lawyers do. They go dig out old cases from 100 years ago. You can go to the Notre Dame Library, and they've got books and books of marriage nullity cases from like 1920. Okay, so you know, I leaf through there, and they're actually really not all that different from from today, um, you know, from more or less 100 years ago. Canon law is very exciting, even from 1920. Okay, Pope Francis. Uh, the new motor proprio, uh, he made extensive changes to the procedure. And that's the very first point that should be pointed out. That the Pope made no changes to the substantive things that I've been talking about here. He didn't introduce any new grounds, he didn't make it any so-called easier in terms of what we're looking for, it had nothing to do with any of that. It only had to do with procedures, how we proceed with the marriage nullity process. Um, let me just hit a few highlights for you. There's actually a number of changes, but some of them are aren't really all that interesting. But the the biggest ones are um, well, I better clear a path here. The Pope was concerned that in some parts of the world, and maybe even sometimes here in the United States, justice was being denied to Catholics because the tribunals didn't maybe run well, you know. In in a lot of third world countries, because of a lack of money, they they can't have fully staffed tribunals. And so, because of that, people that really were in invalid marriages couldn't get a declaration of nullity because either the tribunals didn't work well or they only had one or two staff people, and it was taking years and years and years and years for them to, you know, get a declaration of nullity for a marriage that they knew that was null. So the Pope introduced in this new document a way for the bishop himself rather than the tribunal to be the judge of the case in an expedited way. This is the biggest change, this new track, because there was never a mechanism in canon law before for the bishop to be the judge. So, with the new change, uh, when a case comes in, the judicial vicar looks at it, that's me, so I'm the judicial vicar for this diocese. I look at the case, and I have to determine whether it's going to go through the normal annulment process. Sorry, sister, marriage nullity process. I said that wrong. See, even I pick up on the what the culture says. So the normal marriage nullity process or the expedited path to the bishop. Now, what the Pope said though in this new law is that in order for it to go to the expedited path of the bishop, it has to be clear-cut that it's null. So it's like, you know, like exclusion of children a lot of times is clear-cut. Either it is or it isn't. They said, you know, I excluded children or I didn't. And both parties have to agree to it. Okay, so both the one petitioning and the ex-spouse have to agree that the marriage is null and it's null because of exclusion of children. Now, let me tell you, from what we see the tribunal, that's a very, very tiny group of cases. Okay, first of all, that it's clear cut, and secondly, that both parties agree. That almost never happens. Okay, it just it just doesn't. But in those cases where you have that, it's possible for it to go to the bishop. If it goes to the bishop, he sees that it's clear cut, he can grant the marriage nullity, the declaration of nullity. If he can't grant it, so the bishop has to come to that moral certitude that I was mentioning before. It's the same level. If he can't come to moral certitude, the bishop is never put in the position of saying no. So then it has to go through the normal process anyway.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:50

I thought it was really interesting. Interesting that he said the bishop is never put in the position of having to say no. That was really interesting.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:59

And the normal process then might determine that it's in the negative. That's the biggest change that the Pope made is the addition of this extra process. The second biggest change has to do with what happens after a declaration of nullity happens. So when, like, say me as a judge uh judges in the affirmative, so affirmative means that it has been proved that the marriage was null. So that in other words, in common parlance, that the nulman is granted. Before, actually, currently, that affirmative had to go automatically to the appeals court. So our appeals court is the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, and the appeals court with a panel of three judges. See, I told you I can't spell judge, has to review that case and agree and give it another affirmative. So before, in order for the annulment to be granted, you had to have two affirmatives. The Pope has done away with the second need. So now, when a case after it's after December 8th, when a case uh gets an affirmative, that's it. It doesn't have to go to Indy, it's granted, except there is a short time period for appeal. So, like if the if the other party doesn't agree, the ex-spouse, they can appeal it to Indy. And then Indy would have to look at it. Or that defender, the bond person I was talking about, you know, the one who's always arguing against whether the annulment, if they really feel that the annulment wasn't proved, that the marriage nullity wasn't proved, they can appeal it to Indy. But um again, this will save a lot of those so-called slam dunk cases from having to go through, you know, because the you know, right now our process is taking about 13 months. And then when it went down to Indy, that's if all goes well, sometimes it takes a little longer. When it goes down to Indy, that was anywhere up to another six months. So at least when it's a so-called slam dunk appeal, uh, that six months goes away. So it's a you know a little shorter. Uh could you question just a second? And also, we are the appeals court for the diocese of Lafayette. So when Lafayette gave affirmatives, I had to read them all along with two other judges. That's gonna save me a lot of time because all that goes away. You know, I'm spending 10 to 15 hours a week reading Lafayette cases. Once that goes away, I will have more time to look at our own cases more quickly. Because sometimes it takes me two or three months to get to one of our own cases just because I'm reading Lafayette cases all the time. So that should cut our time down, I hope, to, you know, maybe 11 months, maybe even 10 months, because I'm able to get to them quicker. So though that change really will help as far as speed goes, I think. Um, especially for those that are so-called clear-cut, slam dunk kind of thing. Let's say that I don't judge it in the affirmative, let's say that I judge it in the negative, that to me it's not proved, then then the parties could appeal it to Indy. And they can still appeal to the Yeah, and if Indy gave an affirmative, then it would be granted. Actually, usually the appeals don't take too much more work because you've already really got the lion's share of the evidence already. It might just be some follow-up questions that the appeals court needs to ask. Um, so the appeals in theory shouldn't take the whole time, with the caveat being that sometimes it does take people a while to come in and answer the questions and you know, so on. So at the first level, like here in Fort Wayne, it's just a one-person judge. Oh, just one person. Yeah. When it goes to the second level, then it's three three judges, and you only need two out of the three. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:58

If there is an annulment that is only granted because two out of three judges, Catholic judges using this system, would grant the uh declaration of nullity. Uh, I bet you that marriage, I would view it as valid.

SPEAKER_03 1:45:16

Appeal beyond.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:18

Yeah, right. So there's a higher court than this in Rome called the Roman Rota. And right now they get quite a bit of work because you think about, you know, in order for the annulment to be granted, remember I said you have to have the two affirmatives. So let's say that you know, Fort Wayne South Bank gives it an affirmative, it goes to India automatically now. They give it a negative, okay, then the appeal would be to the rota, Roman rota, and they would have to give it an affirmative in order for it to be granted.

SPEAKER_03 1:45:50

Is that automatically?

SPEAKER_02 1:45:52

No. Uh-uh. No, they have to appeal it, they have to appeal it up there. Um, but now that you only need one affirmative, so like let's say I got a negative here, and then the person appealed it to India and it got an affirmative, then it's done. It doesn't have to go to the rota. Yes. Yeah. In our diocese, uh what it costs us to actually do an annulment case is around $3,000. What we were charging was $450. So, in other words, the diocese ate the rest of the cost, and that was funded through the bishop's appeal, more or less. But the bishop has decided to even drop the $450. So there is no longer any administrative fee for annulments in our diocese. The only cost that we still have is if a person is asked to go for one of these psychological evaluations, we still ask the party to take to pick up that cost, and that can be anywhere between about $600 and $800. But given the new thing from the Pope, um, we are discerning whether we should even drop that and just go ahead and pick that up too. Um, we have to look at how that's going to affect our budget and so forth. But there's no longer, at least, any of the initial administrative cost. They're allowed to marry again. That doesn't seem right to her. Okay, you're right. And the church actually has a vehicle to take care of this, it's called a veditum. So once the annulment is granted on the person and they had an say an inability to assume the essential obligation of marriage, the judge will put a veditum, which in Latin means prohibition, from marrying again until it can be shown that what caused them not to be able to do this before is no longer there. Okay. So the one who lifts the Veditum is actually the vicar general, so not the tribunal. So the tribunal puts it on, the vicar general is the one who takes it off. So in our diocese, that's Monsignor Schulte. And he has to be shown a lot of times through psychological counseling or whatever, that the person has progressed and that now they can uh enter into marriage. So that is in place to do that. But the problem with that is that's not completely an exact science. You know, it's at what point can you really tell going into it that a person has gotten over this? And unfortunately, we see that in the tribunal. You know, we'll see people who had Veditombs put on them, they went through psychological counseling, then we let them marry again, and then five years later they're back asking for another annulment, and the same things that happened in the first marriage happened in the second marriage. You know, we you just we can't control all that. It just, you know, we do the best we can, but there's only so much that can be done sometimes. Veditum. Veditum.

SPEAKER_01 1:48:41

The Catholic system for annulments is subjective and flawed. You know, they found a person who is unable or unwilling to assume the essential obligations of marriage as they define them. Uh, so they granted an annulment, a declaration of nullity of the first marriage. Then they put a hold on that person. They didn't allow them to marry anybody else. They call that a Veditomb. Uh now, I don't think the church has the power to put a hold on somebody to make it impossible for them to marry. But anyway, then they psychological examination, whatever, and they decide, oh, this person now has the ability to assume the essential obligations of a marriage, and they allow them to go ahead and uh marry. And then this person's back a little while later for a second annulment because apparently they were wrong in lifting the Vedatomb. So it just shows that they're calling marriages invalid on subjective grounds, and they know that they get this evaluation of the subjective grounds wrong sometimes. They don't know how to measure this stuff. They don't know how to measure it for lifting the Vedic tomb. They don't know how to measure it when they grant the annulment in the first place or the declaration of nullity. It's a broken, subjective, very flawed system. It's basically Catholic divorce with a lot of lawyers.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:51

Yeah. So when the people are granted the marriage nullity decree, uh, the letter that they receive will say on there, you know, there's been a 82 Placed or professional counseling in his estate or something. So when they go to the priest, they have to give them that letter for the marriage file, and the priest will see that and he'll call the tribunal and then we'll give them the baby tomb. So that's that's sort of how that works. It's probably 60 to 70 percent in the affirmative and 30 to 40 percent in the negative. That's just a thumbnail guess. Um, I could go back and count them up, I suppose, but uh that's just a guess. Yeah, there there's there's actually several options by which a case maybe never comes to judgment. So one of those would be that, yeah, the case actually never really gets started because the party doesn't turn in everything they need to turn in for us to start. Another one would be where uh the one thing about these grounds is that once a judgment is made and you get a double judgment, you can never revisit that ground. So it's like single jeopardy. Uh so there's a little, to quote the former president, there's a little strategery involved sometimes in uh, you know. So with that being said, the advocate, the person who's the the uh church lawyer, if you will, for the person, they might be have to be honest and say to the person, look, there's not enough evidence here for nullity. And if if this goes to judgment, in my opinion, it's gonna be get a negative, and you don't want it to do that. So they can renounce the case, and then and maybe later evidence will come forward, and you might say, Well, how is evidence going to come forward? We see that happen sometimes. Like, this is great when this happens. Okay, so you have a petitioner who's Catholic, you have a respondent who's not Catholic, the other party, the ex spouse, and let's say the respondent, the grounds are on him, okay, but he doesn't want to have anything to do with this. So you can't prove the case because he's not participating, you can't get the psychologicals, he's not giving testimony. So the petitioner has to drop the case because she doesn't want it to go to judgment and get a negative. Five years later, the respondent meets a Catholic. Guess what he wants all of a sudden? He wants an annulment, right? He wants to marry her. So, so sometimes it's better for the petitioner to drop the case, you know. You don't want to wish for this, but there's always the natural solution to, you know, because when somebody dies, then the marriage bond is broken. So you don't know what can happen over the passage of time. And it's better that the person wait than risk a negative so they can renounce it. There's also a thing called abatement, when the petitioner has to do do something and they don't do it, and after six months, then the case just abates.

SPEAKER_01 1:52:44

Okay, so I want to talk about his Jeopardy idea here. I don't really agree with that idea. You know, if somebody claims a marriage is invalid for X reason and they don't have the evidence now, but they come up with the evidence in a month, the delay in getting the evidence doesn't make the marriage valid. So I get that you need to have a process and everything, but it's really just too much to say, well, you you brought it up in January, but you didn't have the information until February. So now it's March, and we can't invalidate the marriage because you already brought that up in January. That's like too much with the lawyer. So uh Mark Gartner, really smart guy. I appreciate his presentation. He's got great teaching ability. You can see why he was a professor at Notre Dame. It's very likable. Um, now in my next episode, uh, we're gonna talk about actual Catholic divorce, not annulment. And there are Catholic divorces. And they call them the Pauline and Petrium privileges. We talked about them a little bit earlier. We're gonna talk about them more in the next episode. So make sure you get a copy of my book, Divorce Your Remarriage. Subscribe, like, comment, give me your thoughts. Let me know what other things you'd like me to cover in the future. And I will see you guys next time.