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ANNULMENTS

ANNULMENTS

The Catholic Church forbids divorce and remarriage between two people who have been baptised. It permits divorce and remarriage when people are not baptised and if one person in a marriage is baptised and the other is not.

An annulment is a declaration that a marriage never really took place but only looked as if it did. It leaves at least one partner free to marry. Annulments are so common and they are granted with perturbing generosity to very wealthy people that many of them are really just divorces under another name.

It is hormones and unrealism that do the talking when marriage vows are made. Marriages based on emotion can hardly be said to be valid. It is the emotion that is making the couple think they will adore one another for life. But the feeling of love can disappear easily and frequently turns into hate and misery. To marry because of how you feel about the person is not the same as marrying for the person.

The Church grants an annulment if it can be found that one partner didn’t mean the marriage vows. If a partner was having a secret affair with the love of their life and marrying somebody else, the Church will accept that as evidence that the marriage was null and void and proceed with annulling the marriage.

Catholics teach that God is to be of supreme importance to you and not your wife or husband. God is only a theory. If you love a theory more than your wife or husband then obviously the marriage is real. No genuine Catholic marriage can be valid. Every Catholic marriage should be annulled by the state.

The Church says it does not proclaim that the children of a marriage that is null and void to be illegitimate or bastards.

The Church says that you must have sex only within a valid marriage. The reason is that sex is supposed to be telling the person you sleep with that you want them entirely and give your whole self. The Church pretends to believe this. The Church says a spouse who is in a state of grave sin can’t give themselves to anybody

Also, if you really give yourself that much then how can you agree with the Church that marriage ends with death? Why not agree with the Mormons that marriage can last for all eternity?

If you tell somebody by having sex that you will spend all your life with them, then it follows that you have to marry the first person you have sex with.

When somebody suffers, the Church says you have the right to believe in God and say that this is God’s will. Naturally, truth has rights. You would have the right to hurt a person’s feelings for the truth. But an atheist would never condone the ways of God. The atheist will simply say that the suffering is awful and they want to help it.

How could any marriage be real when it is easy to feel now that you want somebody for life? You are blinding yourself to the fact that people change over time and that your feelings can change to hatred just like that. You simply can’t promise to care for anybody as your husband or wife forever because your feelings are not perfectly under your control and never will be.

Rights are based on needs.

An annulment is a declaration that a marriage never really took place. Annulments are a big source of scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. Annulments have become back-door divorce in a faith that claims to hold that marriage is indissoluble or cannot be ended except by death. The only difference is that annulments are worse than divorce. They deny that there was a real marriage and that the children were legitimate and require lots more mud slinging than a divorce would demand. It is easier to give grounds for divorce than it is for an annulment.

Today, marriages between Catholics are only considered valid if they take place before a priest or authorised representative of the Catholic Church and before two witnesses. This was brought in to stop the very common practice of clandestine marriages and couples were living together claiming they made their vows to one another without any witnesses. Such marriages were considered valid but it was decided to regulate things more carefully. It is only since the Council of Trent in the seventeenth century that the Church has had the present rules about validity. The Church claimed the power to change the requirements for a valid marriage. If the Church has no such power, then it follows that there are loads of marriages taking place in Churches when the couples are already married to other people. So the Church weddings are invalid. People still make clandestine vows and they are forgotten when the relationship breaks down. Most Catholics have little or no belief in the ability of the Church to validate or invalidate marriages. Thus they cannot trust the Church to annul. They could get invalid annulments.

Annulments are given on the assumption that marriage is nothing more than a couple of vows that only becoming binding with a single sex act even though all believe that marriage only starts with the vows. All believe that you do not say them once and for all but you live them and express them through your marriage. So the husband and wife are making the vows by sign-language all the days of their lives. The living together is actually then far more important and binding and deep than the vows. So logically even if the marriage vows were not meant the marriage could still become real without them for the vows are repeated anew every minute of marriage and are as valid as wedding vows made by a deaf-mute though nothing is said.

Annulments are granted if it was found the parties didn't mean the marriage vows in some way. But when you make a will nobody worries about your mental state when you made the will as long as you were known to be in your right mind after and didn't do anything about the will or fix it. Marriage is like making a will without thinking of death but of life. What you sign to get yourself recognised as a competent driver after your driving test is far more important than marriage. Bad driving kills but marriage doesn't. And nobody cares if you knew what you were doing when you signed it or not. You could have signed it in a haze of stress after the test.

The Church says that sex is one person giving the gift of themselves to another and so it expresses the giving of ones life to another forever. Vows then cannot express marriage or binding together as well as sex can. A last will and testament is no good to you until the person who left you everything dies. The Church should regard sex as causing a marriage not vows. The Church doesn't wish to do that because that would require it to hold that you are married to the person who first takes your virginity. That would mean that nearly every marriage ceremony in the world is a fake and also that if a man loses his virginity to a man they are married! If sex does what the Church says it does, then these conclusions are correct.

The rules of the Church about the vows not being binding if the bride was drugged or if she was on the rebound are based on the idea that marriage is caused by the vows. This contradicts the Church doctrine that the marriage didn't happen in reality if no sex took place after it - say for example the groom died of alcohol poisoning before making it to the marriage bed. In that case, it is the sex matters and the vows only create a potential marriage not a real one. The Church just invents silly rules for it seeks control over marriage. Witnesses to the sex are more important than witnesses to the wedding ceremony but the Church has never required anybody to stand and watch the bride and groom having sex. Yet the Church holds that a wedding is invalid if unsuitable witnesses are chosen for you need at least two proper witnesses. If the witnesses are no good then there is no need for them.

A marriage between two people who mean it more than anybody ever meant it is considered invalid if there are no witnesses! A marriage with a little love is valid as long as there are two witnesses! This is evidently more concerned about law than protecting love! Marriage is nonsense if the witnesses are that important. If they are needed, then why are marriages considered valid even if the witnesses were on drugs or were insane?

The Church doesn't check that the witnesses are under pressure, drunk, on drugs, insane etc. What hypocrisy and deception surrounds the Church teaching on marriage! Feminists suspect that marriage is about patriarchal control, men seeking control over women. No wonder with all the lies and hypocrisies that the Church endorses and embraces in regard to marriage.

The Bible, the so-called word of God, gives no prescriptions for contracting a valid marriage. It is possible that it regards marriages where there was no ceremony or witnesses at all but the woman just went to live with the man on the wedding day as valid (Genesis 24:67, Isaiah 61:10, Matthew 1:24). This suggests that fewer marriages may be annulled validly than the Church would like to think. Its rules and conditions are certainly against the Bible.

It is hard to see how Christians who insist that marriage may take place in any legally accepted manner can know what they are talking about. We know that legal means human and what is human is not infallible or binding of itself (or necessarily binding) so it seems that only Church weddings might be valid. What if the state starts to regard a man and woman only as married properly when they give birth? Many countries only ask that a form be filled out and that is you married. Many countries treat common law marriages as real marriages after a time. In such cases, the couple are going against God’s will by even caring about satisfying the state regulations for it is honouring heresy and honouring people who disagree with God. It is honouring wishes that are contrary to the divine will. Any form of marriage that leaves God out or which is purely civil marriage contradicts the command of Christ to love God above your own life and that of others and his warning that whoever is not for him is against him – there are no in-betweens. It would be necessarily invalid and amenable to annulment.

Adam and Eve were married without wedding vows at all. God made him a partner from his rib and that was enough. The Virgin Mary and St Joseph were married though they never had sex according to Roman Catholic tradition. Yet both marriages would have no trouble being annulled or declared to be non-marriages at all in the annulment tribunals of the Catholic Church today!

The Bible rules out marriages being annulled on the grounds that one or both partners was only a child or too immature. The Virgin Mary’s marriage to Joseph was regarded as valid despite her being underage by today’s standards not even being fifteen! The Bible considers marriages between men and children as valid.

Satan controls all that God is left out of. When the Devil tried to win Jesus over to his side, Jesus was offered the kingdoms of the world by the Devil so the Devil must have owned them otherwise Jesus wouldn’t have been tempted. So those contracting marriages that are secular or civil or which don’t involve God would be unknowingly going to him to bless and validate their marriages! The Bible says that the state is to be paid taxes and obeyed in so far as it doesn’t contradict God. But it never says that Christians should seek their marriage recognition from the state – Satan. The state is only to be tolerated as the Church has to put up with it in the absence of a theocracy headed by the Church. It is another deplorable sign of Christian hypocrisy that the Church supports the state so well.

Some Catholic theologians claim that even when a marriage is annulled, the Church is not declaring the children illegitimate (page 862, Catholicism, Richard P McBrien, HarperSanFrancisco, New York, 1994). See Canon 1137, Code of Canon Law. Richard P McBrien says in his book Catholicism that annulments do not necessarily declare that a marriage never existed only that the marriage wasn't recognised in Canon Law (page 861). Annulments never declare that a loving relationship never existed (page 861). Clearly the Church is saying that even if a marriage is real, it can be annulled. This is simply divorce. It follows that if a real marriage can be annulled just because it didn't fit Canon Law in some way then Canon Law could make a rule that marriages say at a certain time of year could be annulled though they are real marriages.

If the marriage can be annulled then the marriage was not real and the children of the marriage are illegitimate. How can the Church deny this? Is the reasoning that the parents thought they were married and they didn’t intend to produce illegitimate children so the children are not illegitimate? [Radio Replies, First Volume, Question 1288 claims that as long as one party in the marriage was in good faith and in the belief that the marriage was real the children are legitimate]. So if the man knows there is no real marriage and the woman thinks there is then what is the child they have? Half-illegitimate? What about a man and woman who don't believe in marriage but pretend they marry each other in a real ceremony and then have children? What about a man and woman who are not married but who do not believe in marriage and who do not therefore think that their children are illegitimate? What about a man and woman who think that as an illegitimate child means an illegal child that their child can't be illegal? It is not illegal to have a child outside of wedlock. And even if it were, it is not illegal unless there is a punishment. A law that has no force and no penalty is not a law at all. Some people believe that while you are having sex with somebody you are married to them and any child can't be illegitimate.

The theologians claim that when a marriage is annulled the children of the marriage are still legitimate. Why not extend this to women on drugs who get pregnant while thinking they are married to the man having sex with them? Why not hypnotise a woman to wrongly think she is married to you so that you can father a legitimate baby with her? They might say that consent was defective in these cases so the babies will still be illegitimate. But they say consent was defective in the annulled marriage so that is no help! Also the women on drugs were not forced to take the drugs and so are responsible for anything they do under the influence. You can't be hypnotised against your will. They have as much right to have the babies considered legitimate as the annulled couple's children - assuming there is such a right!

Some might say that real marriages can be annulled by mistake so calling the children of the marriage illegitimate would be wrong. But you would still be saying they could be illegitimate. This view doesn't put much confidence in annulments. If most annulments are valid and correct then it follows that it is right to say that children are probably illegitimate.

The theologians are pretending then they don't think of the children as bastards. They do. Their teaching is just whitewash for the Church holds that children conceived or born outside of TRUE marriage are illegitimate and should not exist. It makes no sense to say that children produced in an unreal marriage should exist if the Church is right to think of any child as illegitimate or a bastard (which it is not, there is no such thing as illegitimate children, all children are precious). It’s the same lie that claims that if your spouse becomes ill and this is a very very heavy cross for you that the sick person is not the burden but their sickness is. You are not looking after a sickness but a person. It is persons that get sick and a person cannot be separated from their sickness. If the children of an annulled marriage are legitimate then the marriage was real and the Church granted the parents a divorce disguised as an annulment.

The doctrine that the marriage vows may not be binding or valid means that when the man and woman have sex the consent implied by their sex may not be valid either. For example, if a man changed his mind after the wedding and went through the motions of the consummation then is the marriage consummated properly? Surely there isn't a marriage in the world that cannot be annulled? If a man who validly married his wife and validly consummated the marriage, surely the children are illegitimate by his intention if he fathered them while hoping his marriage was invalid? To say children should be conceived or called legitimate as long as the parents made real marriage vows and consumed the marriage is to say that laws matter more than the children! Would you think much of children if you held that only red-haired women for example should be allowed to have babies?

The insincerity of the theologians is astonishing.

The Church says marriage is holy - that is it must be devoted to God and lived the way he wants it lived. It is also a sacrament - a sacrament is a rite that pictures the life and soul transforming power of God that really does what it pictures. For example, baptism represents God washing away sin and actually does this to those who undergo the rite.

If marriage is as sacred as the Church says, then it is far worse for a blissfully unaware couple in a fake marriage to produce children than for a couple who are just fornicating without any interest in being the centre of a wedding ceremony to do it. Counterfeits of the good are worse than brazen evil - and the Church certainly thinks the latter couple are brazen evildoers. The latter know they can have the sacrament of marriage to take them to Heaven but the former is under the illusion that they have the sacrament already!

The Church says marriage is the bedrock of society. This is nonsense. It is the family. Jesus Christ however stated that families should only happen in the context of marriage so he was saying that marriage was the bedrock and insulting any other family arrangement. He was saying that it is okay if a woman loses her husband to sickness and is left with six young children as long as the children were conceived within marriage. So that is all that is important. Marriage is not about a man and woman helping each other look after children but only about how the children came to be. A woman who has a man she is not married to who are devoted to their children is looked down upon while a married lady who had her children in marriage but with her husband is less devoted count more.

Commonsense and decency prove that one can have a close family without Catholic style marriage. Indeed the Church has to confess that some Catholic marriages seem to be successful though they are not real marriages. It is only when a marriage breaks down that attempts to have the marriage declared null and void take place. So if a marriage that was subsequently annulled didn't break down nobody would know the marriage wasn't genuine. If marriage is the bedrock of society and therefore the Church (for the Church is a society) then why does the Church endanger it so much? Any couple that agree to lie can get an annulment. State sponsored divorce has more respect for marriage than annulments. At least the existence of the marriage is recognised. If marriage is so important to society, is it not better to take it for granted that every wedding produces a real marriage except when a partner was insane or unable to have sex or when the groom accidentally married his beloved's twin sister?

What the Church believes is that only sacramental marriage is the bedrock of society. It should admit this though it does not care to. The Church allows non-sacramental marriages to be annulled or to result in divorce with the right to remarry sacramentally. In other words, the Catholic Church is saying that the Catholic Church is the bedrock of society for it facilitates and regulates sacramental marriage. This is vile intolerance.

The Church believes that you cannot properly or truly love others without loving God and believing in him. Thus a person who doesn't have much faith in God and receives the sacrament of marriage is blocking its power to unite with the wife or husband. They don't understand their obligations well. Thus near-unbelief and unbelief is in the Catholic system a ground for claiming that if a pair wed and they didn't believe or barely believed, then they didn't undertake the obligations of marriage properly. So the Church uses that as an excuse for declaring their marriage invalid if they part ways. Religious believers have no right to tamper with marriage on religious grounds. Society cannot function if all start doing things that hurt others in the name of faith. Such actions may include refusing to pay taxes on spiritual grounds or if men start raping children believing this rape gives them grace etc. In the real world we have to live as if the real world is the only world. With so many different spiritual doctrines and claims abounding we have no choice.

If a country forbids a couple who got a Church annulment to remarry the Church tells them to get a divorce. So the Church while claiming to forbid divorce takes advantage of the state allowing it. So much for wanting marriage protected from divorce! The Church says that the priest does not give the sacrament of marriage but that the bride and groom give it to each other. It is impossible to see how they could really intend to give a sacrament when marriage as propounded by the Church is full of deceit and hypocrisy and it is actually an insult to ones partner to contract marriage under its laws. The annulment laws of the Church make it impossible for you to know if you are really marrying anybody or not. If you don't know, then you are not really giving yourself in the wedding ceremony in marriage for life. You are giving yourself until annulment us do part.

The Church always taught that marriages which were not consummated can be annulled. Nowadays it claims to still believe this as much as ever but has added in the idea of psychological non-consummation. An example of it is when the husband and wife consume their marriage but the husband is not in love with her but with somebody else so anything he does with his wife in bed it is the other woman he is really making love to for it is just her in his mind and heart. As PJ McGrath noted, for a religion to change doctrine and become more liberal and then claim that it has never changed doctrine for the wording, “A marriage that is not consummated can be declared to be a non-marriage” describes its current position as well as its past position is just the same kind of lying we are accustomed to from politicians (page 100, Believing in God). A famous example of such obfuscation is in the Catholic doctrine that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church at all. The Church recently changed the meaning of Church to include anybody earnestly seeking after God even an atheist or idolater as long as they were sincere. The Church in the past certainly never went that far. To say that there is no salvation outside the Church as the Church means it now makes no sense for the word Church doesn’t mean anything if any sincere seeker can be part of it. The word Buddhism doesn’t describe anything if even somebody who has never meditated in their life or heard of Buddhism can be a Buddhist nevertheless.

A marriage that isn’t consummated is said to be incomplete. So says the Church which should admit that it doesn’t think there is a marriage until its consummated. Strange that you need witnesses for the ceremony but they are not required at the consummation which is when marriage actually takes place! It is like saying you should have an employee promise to do a good job in front of witnesses but that he doesn't have to be observed during the first day at work! That shows you are putting ceremony before commonsense and are not really concerned about his performance or dedication at all. The Church cares more about ceremonies than the people involved.

The Church pounces on non-consummation as an excuse for giving out annulments when the marriage act hasn’t taken place. But what marriage is complete? No marriage is complete all the time. A marriage seems to cease being complete when the husband and wife stop having sex. A marriage seems incomplete when there are no children. A marriage seems incomplete if the wife goes insane days after the wedding and has to go the asylum for the rest of her life. The point is, why should the incompleteness signified by non-consummation be singled out as grounds for annulment?

What about a marriage that was consumed but in which the husband never ejaculated or didn’t love his wife enough when it happened?

The Church says that sex should always end with the man ejaculating inside his wife's vagina. The Church allows different sexual positions. It lets the husband and wife decide how they will have sex as long as they do not use contraception and the sex ends with the penis ejaculating in the wife's vagina. It seems that if the husband does not have an orgasm inside his wife then the marriage is not consumed until he does. The Church sets up a criteria of morality that is based on biology and not love. The result is that the husband and wife consume marriage but they do not consummate their love! Marriage is about law and not love. In Catholicism, it is about clerical power.

Why stop with saying the husband must ejaculate in his wife's vagina to consummate the marriage? Why not say that the wife must have an orgasm with him just as he has his orgasm? Marriage proclaims that the Church should have the right to discriminate against men who can't have orgasms. No wonder the vast majority of marriages result in the male acting superior to the female and in the past wives were mere slaves of their husband.

The Church says that the language of sex is that you wish to be with the person you have sex with forever. It says that is the message sex communicates. If sex does that then ejaculation does that even more. The Church says it is a sin for the man to withdraw from the woman to ejaculate outside her. If the purpose of this is that the man prefers to do it and not to avoid conception then it is still a sin. The Church says the withdrawal turns the sex into a lie. The Church reasons that man declares by sex that he wants his woman completely and then he contradicts this by not giving her his seed. Teaching such as this imply that it is a sin for a man to have sex if he cannot ejaculate.

The Church unduly and disastrously encourages marriage with the false notion that marriage is a sacrament – a magical ceremony that fortifies the union. It makes naïve people or people who are not ready for marriage decide to marry for what better helper in marriage could there be than God? The Church says there are three partners in marriage, the husband, wife and Jesus. When a couple want to wed the most important thing is, if marriage is indeed a sacrament, that they ensure that their marriage will be valid and filled with God’s grace which is his supernatural help that unifies the woman and man. The grace of the sacrament will not work if the man and woman both stubbornly adhere to mortal sin for mortal sin is the total rejection of God and his ways. So that means it is a sin to marry anybody you suspect is in mortal sin. Though some say you cannot judge, there is nothing that will stop you suspecting – that is human nature. So if you see that a person could be in mortal sin then it is a sin – a mortal sin – to marry them. If you do not know enough about the mortal sins until after the marriage, you would be entitled to an annulment for it means the partner married you while blocking out God who alone can keep you one in marriage. The partner then would have been insincere in making the vows even if he kidded himself that he was genuine. So you can get an annulment then when that happens if your partner approves or believes in tolerating abortion, contraception, homosexuality, divorce, atheism all of which are considered to be very serious sins by the Church that cut off God’s influence and grace.

The idea of marriage being a sacrament is madness for a sacrament requires a symbolic action that really does what it pictures. Marriage is not symbolic. In baptism, water is used to picture God cleansing sins away. In communion, bread and wine are taken as emblems of the body and blood of Christ and give you his body and blood. But God left no fixed form for marriage at all. If the Church so chose it could change the way marriage is done entirely. Marriage then is not a sacrament. Also, no sacrament can bind a man and woman together. They are still two people legally bound together. A sacrament can give them the strengths and influences they need to maintain this union. In that case, there is no power causing the union but only a power helping the union to be maintained. So to speak of marriage as a sacrament is foolish. The union itself cannot be a sacrament. Divine grace may help you be a good employee to your boss but that doesn't mean it causes the union between you and the boss and this union is a sacrament! The Church desired to interfere in marriage and to do that it had to lie that Jesus made it a sacrament and so something the Church must look after.

The Church says that only two baptised Catholics getting married can be sacramentally married. It says there are marriages that are valid but not sacramental and such marriages are not binding under certain circumstances and divorce is permitted. For example, a woman is really married to her husband if both of them were never baptised and if she becomes a baptised Catholic she may remarry and repudiate her marriage. If marriage is a sacrament it must be a sin for a Catholic to contract a marriage with an unbaptised person even with the permission of the Church. It is turning your back on a sacrament.

The teaching of the Church that divorce is permitted for non-sacramental marriage contradicts the Church teaching that sex in marriage expresses life-long commitment.

A couple who lived together up to the wedding could not be really married in the eyes of God for cohabitation is a serious sin. The Church says that if you are willing to take the Church’s word for it that marriage is a sacrament, then logically you should take its word for it that its teaching about what is mortal sin is right. Therefore it would be impossible for the Church to even partly excuse. It would be suspicious and therefore unable to proceed with the wedding until its suspicions are lifted which can only be done if the couple confess to a priest that they lived in sin and get absolution. If you contracted a marriage in mortal sin yourself you would be entitled to an annulment. The Church would have to take your word for it like it does in confession so an annulment should be very easy to get. But this would mean that every marriage could be annulled just because the husband or wife said they married in sin. True. But the Church says conscience is the final guide. The Church says there are many marriages out there that are invalid but there is no evidence for this invalidity just like there are many thieves who are guilty but who have to be let off by the courts. Courts and rules can’t deal with everything. The Church would have to let you do your own thing and walk out on your husband or wife and get married again if you believe you did not marry right as long as you do this for godly motives.

A Church annulment need not be recognised by the civil law. If the two agreed it would be. You must decide which of these is to be trusted: the Church or the courts. If the law of the land comes first – and it does for its not the Church that sends the police around and holds law cases and feeds the people - then the Church has no right to annul marriages outside of the law. The Church is obviously laying claim to come first.

If marriage must be taken before God to be valid as the Catholic Church claims then clearly the state has no business annulling marriages at all! It should leave this job to the Church and recognise the annulments granted by the Church as valid.

Sinners cannot contract a valid marriage for they have turned their backs on goodness by rejecting the Lord. To get married, you have to intend to be good to your partner. But when you have set your face against the God who is best for her or him you cannot mean your vows. The Church says that you can really be married in a state of sin but the sacrilege will draw down the anger of God on you (Question 308, A Catechism of Christian Doctrine).

The Church says that if a marriage is contracted in a state of mortal sin then the grace of the marriage will not be activated until the mortal sin is given up. How then could it be a sacrament to take marriage vows? How could there be a real marriage until the mortal sin is abandoned? If you really take your woman as your wife in a strong and lifelong commitment you will not refuse to have God and his grace involved for they are needed to ensure that this commitment has a good chance. The Church doesn’t say marriages can only be annulled if at least one of the partners meant nothing he or she said in the marriage vows. It’s enough if he or she didn’t mean them more than he or she meant them. Obviously such a law enables the Church to annul any marriage it wants.

The Church proclaims itself to be a great protector of marriage and family and yet it likes to conceal its real attitude towards marriage so it follows then that every married couple has been misled and entitled to an annulment. The marriage cannot be binding when you have a faith in annulments that prevents a valid marriage. A non-religious wedding in a register office would have more hope of validity. It would be more sincere and more respectable. Christian marriage cannot be real which makes its stern condemnation of adultery seem very unfair.

Rather than helping marriage, we see that sacramentalist faith actually destroys it replacing it with something that resembles it. Moreover, there is no reason why the state cannot annul Catholic marriages on the basis that mortal sin prevented the vows from being sincere for even the state cannot recognise a marriage that the vows were made insincerely for. The state should come first and should discourage Catholic belief if it really wants to protect marriage. Religion and supernatural beliefs should not be impinging on marriage or marriage law if marriage is really the foundation of society or at least very important to social cohesion and order. We have to put what we see first and not worry about fairies and gods and angels who we don't see. Nicole Kidman was permitted to marry in a Catholic Church for her previous marriage to Tom Cruise was considered to be void as they were Scientologists at the time. They were not marrying for the Catholic God but for another faith. This contradicts the idea that if you are an atheist and a good person the goodness you touch is really touching God as long as you are sincere. It is totally out of sync with modern attitudes. The liberal theologian would say that Nicole and Tom though they didn't bother with God in their marriage ceremony were still getting in touch with him and finding him in their love for one another though they didn't see it. If this theologian was a liberal Anglo-Catholic or anti-papal Catholic etc he would say they received a sacramental marriage.

The Church uses the law to invalidate gay weddings and prohibit them. Yet this same Church feels free to officiate at marriages that have taken place after a Church annulment when one of the partners got a previous legal marriage annulled by the Church which amounts to bigamy in the eyes of the state. This plainly declares that the Church has the right to undermine the state. The Church saying the state is the defender of marriage in God’s plan is inconsistent with this. A Church that defies the state or ignores it is severing the state from the power to protect marriage. The Church regards marriage as binding because she regards them as binding and not because the state does for she is above the state. The Church then is denying by its actions that the state is the protector of marriage and children and taking that role for herself though she cannot do it and does not bother trying in the sense that she does not give out the state benefits and privileges that encourage marriage and help it.

The Church does nothing to stop weddings when one partner is definitely a bit innocent or retarded and all ministers have performed such weddings. This is incredible for surely it is better to halt an invalid marriage than to let it happen and torment everyone and empty their pockets in the process of declaring the marriage null?

Granting an annulment for non-consummation of a marriage or for a person being drunk or insane when they took the vows is one thing but the Church has added to these limitations. You can get an annulment now if you were brought up in a dysfunctional family or had not been ready in your mind for marriage. Anybody could say they were not ready for marriage. And nobody can prove that they were telling the truth. This threatens all marriages for even if the limits to the damage to marriage that divorce can do are few there is no stopping point at all- and if a place is made it is just a nasty big inconsistency and does not make the practice good or fair. The fact is, if you know that marriage is hard means staying together for life and get hitched and don’t say that you didn’t mean your vows at the time you should not be believed later on in life when you look for an annulment on the grounds of mental reservation. If the Church loved killers she would permit declaring them innocent if they claimed to have acted insincerely when they murdered just like the person whose marriage is annulled has. Annulments have a long and expensive pile of work behind them. Where is the logic in the almost endless wait for the declaration of nullity when all they really have to go on is a person’s claim to have not meant the wedding vows? Nobody can prove the person is being truthful. The reason is money. The Church makes money out of the annulments.

You can get an annulment for not intending to have children when you got married. This implies that it is not enough to consume a marriage. Conception must take place before the marriage can be considered valid.

The Church encourages a couple to seek an annulment if they split up. A holy religion would make them go through the procedure when their marriage was strong to make sure they were really married. The attitude she instils is, “I don’t mind if my marriage is unreal and if it is fake I don’t want to know unless we decide to part”. This is no less than intending to commit fornication to make the “wife” an unmarried mother and a cohabiter rather than a wife. So, the Church suffocates real love between husband and wife.

The Bible God said that compulsion does not invalidate marriage. In Deuteronomy, God said that a single man who had sex with a virgin or raped her must marry her and stay married to her as long as he lives (22:29). It also decreed that he has to pay her father fifty shekels. The price was a fine as well as a moher or dowry and the father was the only person God worried about! The fine should have been paid to the girl and the moher to the father if he needed it. God obviously hated fornication more than inflicting the misery of a compulsory marriage and having no concern for the woman. The man was better off for he could take more wives if he wanted to.

The Bible God also said that marriage is valid without the woman’s consent for it is known that in those days the man said the vows and the woman said nothing (page 138, MARRIAGE, Biblical Dictionary and Concordance, New American Bible).

The Bible God also said that marriage is valid when the husband cannot really care about his wife because he supports the status quo that has men only punished if they commit adultery and women punished for every sexual sin (ibid).

It is only because society cannot accept and has not accepted for centuries that such weddings are binding that the Church says they are not. The Church courts false credibility. We read in the Biblical Dictionary and Concordance that God did not violently disrupt the social attitudes and practices of the time but worked on improving things bit by bit so he tolerated the evil laws and ratified them to stop things getting any worse. He didn’t mind violently disrupting the pagans the Hebrews fought with to eliminate homosexuality and idols. That is just an excuse. The Law says the Hebrews were terrified of God so they could have been changed. The Law prescribes a lot of butchering for Hebrews who disobeyed and are we to believe that they wanted that and that that was not shoved on them?

The annulment doctrine is a great way for the Church to make money. It means that it is your duty to look for an annulment and spend a fortune trying to get it, if your marriage breaks down so that you can get a new partner and please God by identifying your marriage as a fake and not a true sacrament which is important for God wants us to be clear in such things for the sacraments are of supreme importance.

The Church keeps its reasons for annulling a marriage secret. What if an annulment needs to be appealed? There is no appeals procedure in place. At least with divorce you can judge if the persons should have been granted a divorce decree for all is laid bare. The secrecy allows the Church to do what it wants and we do have seen cases where the Church annulled marriages under dubious circumstances for the rich and famous. An annulment is a declaration that no marriage took place for the husband or wife didn’t really intended properly to get married so what does this say about ordinations? Why not allow some of them to be annulled as well? Its all exploitation and political manipulation. Annulments are mostly back-door divorces and especially as the Church takes care to make sure the couple knows what they are doing and getting into before they get married (pre-marriage courses, meetings with the priest who will be officiating at the wedding etc.). They are dishonesty.

Dubious psychological grounds for granting an annulment are accepted despite the modern realisation that psychologists cannot be trusted except up to a point. For example, the Church accepts the bleat, "I wasn't a very mature person when I married", as justification for annulling a marriage if it seems to be the truth. People marry because of their feelings more than anything else. If their partner grew seventy years older overnight just before the wedding the wedding would soon be called off. Feelings change. They can disappear through time. A person can and will change and how you can feel about that person will also change. When marriage is so deeply based on how the pair feel now it is obvious that they are deceiving themselves by promising to love one another for life. No marriage could really be valid.

The Church has annulled lots of marriages and has won infamy for doing so for it is clear that it can annul nearly any marriage when it puts its mind to it. The disagreement about the grounds for annulment that exists in the world of lawyers and theologians is frightening. No marriage is safe. Can anybody be blamed for wondering if they are married at all? The married couple may know best if their marriage should be annulled so it seems there is nothing to stop them ending the marriage even without a church declaration of nullity.

The pope, Benedict XVI, has condemned annulment tribunals for being too generous in doling out annulments. Then why doesn’t he set up a commission to examine their work and overturn some of these annulments? If marriages can be annulled then annulments can be invalidated as well!

There is so much harmful and discriminatory nonsense taught by the Catholic Church in relation to marriage. People who teach absurd morals have no right to expect people to assume they are sincere. They should prove their sincerity by doing good works. For example, if you are a priest or nun and encourage people to believe that it is better to catch killer sexually transmitted diseases than to protect with condoms, then if you are sincere you will be among the people who suffer the consequences of your doctrine helping them. The pope does nothing and lives in grandeur so we should do the decent thing and brand him as a bigoted despicable old hypocrite.

CONCLUSION

Annulments are backdoor divorce and those Catholics who approve of them and then wail about how marriage isn’t sacred any more need to be shown their hypocrisy.