Drum5343 said:
one MEEN Ag said:
In summary:
Heads I win
Tails you lose.
Those Catholics used their time wisely to really nail down the nitty gritty of Shrodingers sacrament here. If she didn't want kids and revealed it later we've go ourselves an annulment.
If she didn't want kids, but changed her mind in her marriage. We just don't have a Catholic marriage anymore but a natural marriage performed by a Catholic priest.
Incredible.
Let's move on I want to discuss the treasury of merit and purgatory now.
I guess I don't understand what's hard about understanding the concept: openness to children is a necessary condition for a sacramental marriage to be confected.
Hey there's a lot going on in this sentence, and a lot of it we've covered over the last two pages.
Firstly, sorry to hear you're going through this annulment process. You and whomever else is going through it is in my prayers.
On this thread there are basically four objections being made against catholic annulment process.
Firstly, Moses was given authority by God to grant divorces. Not happily, but still a power. The shared ortho-catholic church history inherited that tradition. Bishops weighed in on divorce and annulment and granted them sparingly and as they saw fit. They are bishops. The bindings on a bishop are that they one day have to answer to God directly for their actions. Nothing else can really bind a bishop. Granting divorce by the catholic church has been bound by catholic bishops in ways that it was not bound by orthodox bishops. So that is the top level critique here, and ultimately
irreconcilable differences between the orthodox and catholic.
Secondly, there is a point of contention about what it even means to have a sacrament of marriage, and what is required for marriage to exist. In the OT, ancient times, in the early church, and the orthodox church marriage as a sacrament is not nearly as tightly bound
to the state of the minds of the man and woman entering into marriage. God can and will be present in your sacramental marriage even if you're hiding something from your spouse. Side note, this rise of
reason as the central deciding factor for a lot of things is a distinctly catholic thing. All the reasons listed for annulment by banned would not undo or nullify a marriage. The idea that you don't want kids but hid it from your spouse does not nullify the sacrament or the presence of God in a marriage.
Thirdly, there is objection to what the annulment process even means. That priests convene and discuss if God even was present in a sacrament at all. And that through the confessions of humans, and the logical processes of priests in committee, we can discern authoritatively that God was not present at all in a sacrament, and because of this lack of God, the marriage never took place. That authority to declare God is not here and that being the reason to declare that a 30+ year marriage even was never a marriage is flatly rejected by basically everyone who isn't catholic. Zobel points out that Paul never claims that a marriage between a believer and a non believer is not a marriage.
And fourthly, the purpose of a system is what it does. Annulment is the process to be able to remain in catholic standing and be separated from your spouse. Period. If catholics were allowed to have divorce, would you or anyone else want to go through an annulment process? Willingly, have your whole marriage reduced down to things like whether or not your ex wife claims to have not wanted kids 30 years ago? Or they weren't sober. Clearly the number of annulments would plummet. And the whole pretense would drop. You cant sit here, Banned, and tell me that if catholics were given normalized access to divorce that annulments wouldn't be reduced back to their historical average of really, actually concerning itself with corner cases. And so annulment is the pressure relief valve on providing church approved separation and access to another marriage.
And finally, we know that its just window dressing on a divorce, because look at everyone talk about their annulments here and at large. The reasons for divorce are never the reasons for annulment. Catholics are getting divorced for the same reason in society the rest of society are. Wives get fat, the nagging never ends, the drinking never stops, the career never progressed, people got sick, spouses got abandoned, someone cheated, kids don't come, and or the attention of someone younger, prettier, less jaded, and more desirable came along. So what are we even doing here? You've been hurt the same way that everyone else in a marriage going through a divorce is and you're seeking the same remediation - formal separation.
And the fact that the annulment is at the end of the separation process, not the beginning shows that is just a bureaucratic machination to give people what they want: endorsement of a separation and the ability to get back up there and get remarried by a priest.
Banned, has basically solemnly sworn on this thread, that he takes marriage so seriously he would chase his wife down regardless of her sins against his marriage and ill will towards him like he was Hosea and his wife was Gomer. But that is easy to say when your wife isn't Gomer. If Banned's wife started an onlyfans, slept with everyone she could, and drained his bank account to drugs, alcohol and entertaining men, and did so unrepentantly - he'd be first in line to go figure out if she suddenly had some failing of the mind upon their marriage to get the hell out of there. Anyone would. (I mean no ill will towards Banned's wife - I'm sure she is actually a very pious catholic woman. I'm just rejecting the height of Banned's rhetoric towards marriage.)
If marriage is given to man and woman to be a small foretaste of how much God loves us and how being in union with your creator in heaven will be infinitely more bliss than you experience at the height of your marriage, then divorce is the foretaste of what separation from God looks like. And just like we have free will to enter into union with God, we ultimately have free will to leave Him. Because your heart will not stick around even if the canon lawyers demand you do.
