Lesson of the Week: The Difference between Divorce and Annulment

INTRODUCTION

The Church's teaching on divorce and remarriage is not popular these days. That's understandable because today's culture is more about feelings than faithfulness, and since feelings come and go, why shouldn't marriages come and go, too?

A culture that values feelings over faithfulness will automatically cause pain, suffering, and tension in the institution of marriage. But it is helpful for us to remember that the Church's teaching on divorce and remarriage has always been unpopular.

In ancient Rome, divorce and remarriage were common and accepted. In ancient barbarian kingdoms, the same was true. In early medieval Europe, even Catholic rulers habitually resisted this Gospel command, which Jesus so clearly stated: "What God has joined together, no human being must separate."

It is almost always one of the most complex doctrines for missionaries to explain to people hearing the gospel for the first time – as it was with the first Catholic missionaries in North America.

For modern Catholics, a common misunderstanding about this difficult teaching has to do with the difference between divorce and annulment. Today's Gospel passage gives us a perfect opportunity to reflect on this issue and clarify some (but probably not all) essential concepts.

Part I: The Example of Tom and Paula

I want to begin by telling you about Tom and Paula. Tom and Paula lived together as husband and wife for over seventy years. Tom worked at the post office. He retired when he turned 75.

Paula worked as a bank teller. She planned on leaving her job as soon as they had their first child, but it turns out that they never had any children; it was one blessing that God didn't give them. Paula stopped working at the bank when she turned 75.

They led a simple life: they were never featured in the newspaper; they never got rich; they never took fancy vacations, but everyone on their street loved them. They were the neighborhood babysitters; they were the shoulders to cry on for young spouses having marriage troubles; they were the organizers of the yearly block party; their yard was more played in than any other on the street.

Their home exuded happiness and joy, just like their happy faces. Tom died in his sleep a few days before his ninety-first birthday. He seemed in perfect health, but his life had concluded.

Paula seemed in perfect health, too, and she appeared to withstand the loss reasonably well. For a couple of days, anyway. But after three days without Tom, she too passed away, unable, so it seemed, to let her husband get too far out of reach.

This story is true [the names have been altered], but it's not rare. It often happens that couples who share long and loving marriages die almost simultaneously, not for medical reasons but for spiritual ones.

The phenomenon eloquently illustrates something about marriage that you rarely hear people talk about – which is too bad because that "something" is the most important thing about marriage.

It's called "the marriage bond." Understanding what it is and where it comes from is the only way to under-stand Catholic teaching about divorce, remarriage, and annulment.

Part II: The Marriage Bond

When two people go into business together, they form a partnership. They agree to work together on a project that will benefit them; their bond is entirely practical, exterior, and contractual.

When two people get married, they do much, much more. They pledge their whole selves to one another unconditionally out of love. And in so doing, they become, as it were, one person, "one flesh," as today's Readings remind us.

They are bonded not by an external contract or agree-ment, like business partners, but by the mutual commitment to be one another's spouse. Not just friends, not just companions, but spouses. As spouses, their identity as individuals is enriched: Tom and Paula are no longer just Tom and Paula; they are now Tom the Husband and Paula the Wife.

Two separate individuals have come together and freely entered into a new, unified life in which the spouses live no longer for themselves but for each other. A new physical-spiritual reality has come into existence: a marriage, a unique, exclusive, permanent bond between husband and wife. That's marriage, as Jesus said in today's Gospel passage.

Even though you can't physically see this marriage bond, it's as objectively real as the child that naturally springs from it. That child, an objective, physical-spiritual reality that didn't exist before, is a living icon, a palpable expression of what the marriage itself is, by its very nature: an objective, physical-spiritual reality that didn't exist before.

And that's why a marriage can no more be "undone" – which is what divorce and remarriage claim to do, to "undo" a previous marriage – than the life of that child. You can dissolve a business agreement, but you can't dissolve a child – at least, not without committing murder. And you can't dissolve a marriage without the death of one of the spouses.

From that point of view, it's no wonder that Paula couldn't continue living without Tom. After seventy years of faithful marriage, her very life, body, and soul were fused, as it were, with her husband's.

(Of course, that doesn't happen every time one spouse dies; other factors are involved. Many widows and widowers survive long after their spouse's death and even marry again, even though their first love was deep and their first marriage valid.)

Part III: The Divorce Mentality

This understanding of marriage is not easy for many of us to accept. We have all been more or less infected by our society's divorce mentality. This mentality sees marriage as a mere social construct, like any business partnership—at the mercy of the partners' needs and whims.

We don't have to go far to discover the flaws in that point of view. We don't even have to go to the Bible or the Catechism. All we have to do is go to human experience.

Even though different societies have surrounded marriage with many other ceremonies, taboos, and external traditions, they have all had the institution of marriage.

Here is how one expert has explained it: [M]arriage is rooted so deeply in human nature that it is found in every age and culture. Anthropologists studying a culture do not ask whether its members marry but what unique characteristics marriage has in that society. In doing so, they refer to something recognizable in any society by its constant characteristics: [which are] the more or less stable heterosexual relationship recognized by society as the community in which it is appropriate for a man and a woman to engage regularly in sexual intercourse, and to beget and raise children." (Germain Grisez, "Living a Christian Life" Introduction to Chapter 9)

Human beings create business and legal partnerships, but we don't "create" marriage – instead, we enter into marriage just as we enter into friendship.

The institution of marriage is natural; it's an objective reality built into human nature by God himself, and it's what people do. It existed before legal and social codes and could not be essentially altered by them more than by human nature itself.

Jesus thinks so highly of this natural institution of marriage that he elevated it to a sacrament. For baptized Christians, the natural bond of marriage is reinforced with the strength of God's grace.

It is transformed into a supernatural reality, a way for the spouses to love not only each other and their children but also God and the Church.

Part IV: Blocking the Marriage Bond

So, scientists can tell us that marriage is a natural institution linked to human nature before it gets linked to laws and politics.

But common sense leads us to the same conclusion. When an average couple gets married, it's because they want to spend the rest of their lives together and they want to build a family. That's what marriage is, and they will answer if asked why they want to get married.

And if that's not their answer, if instead, their answer is something like, "We're looking for financial security," or "I need a spouse to advance in my career," or "She's pregnant, and she doesn't want to get an abortion, but we don't want to embarrass her."

Suppose those or other external, merely practical goals are the only real reasons for either one of the spouses. In that case, they may go through with some marriage ceremony and have a wedding, but they will not really consent to marriage. They will enter a glorified business partnership but not into a marriage bond.

Likewise, if one or both of the would-be spouses puts unnatural conditions on the marriage – for example, that they will purposely avoid having children so they can be free to travel, or that if they get a divorce, they will divide their property in such-and-such a way, or if the groom consciously intends to continue having extramarital affairs.

In cases like these, the formation of a valid marriage bond is blocked. The couple may be forming a legal, contractual relationship, but not the whole interper-sonal communion of spouses.

In other cases, even when the couple enters marriage in good faith and does everything, they believe is necessary for marriage, there may be an unconscious defect in their capacity to make the full consent necessary to form the marriage bond – a temporary or permanent psychological condition, for instance. In this case, too, no real marriage would be entered into.

Part V: The Role of Annulments

Because human nature is fallen and wounded by original sin, cases like these are not unheard of. And that's why the Church has what's called the process of marriage annulment.

Unlike divorce and remarriage, which claim to undo a marriage bond that existed, an annulment states that an apparent marriage never existed because a flaw in the consent of one or both parties blocked the formation of the marriage bond.

In that case, the parties involved are not married, and so they are free to get married. Sometimes, the cause of "failed" marriages can be traced back to these kinds of conscious or unconscious flaws in the original consent.

Each Catholic diocese assigns the complex and delicate task of discerning these cases to a marriage tribunal, which operates according to carefully prescribed procedures.

Sometimes severe difficulties in a marriage may require, for the good of the spouses or of the children, separation or even civil divorce (for example, in the case of physical abuse), and Catholics in these situations can still be in full communion with the Church.

Annulments and separations are always painful, which is one of the reasons why the Church encourages her children to prepare well for marriage.

Not only by attending marriage preparation classes – which are essential – but most importantly by living a life of virtue, prayer, and faith, and by ridding them-selves of the widespread "divorce mentality." There are times in every marriage when love is sorely tested.

The marriage will emerge more substantial and more profound if the test is met and overcome with fortitude, self-sacrifice, and maturity – virtues that need to be developed before the moment of crisis to be activated during the crisis.

Conclusion: A Mirror of God's Love

Husband and wife are no longer two but one flesh, one person, as it were; they exist no longer for themselves but for each other. That's how God designed it. And he created it for a reason: he wanted the love of husband and wife to mirror his love for us.

The New Testament speaks of the Church as Christ's spouse and Christ as the faithful bridegroom.

Let's thank God for patiently showing us the true meaning of marriage and pray for all Catholic marriages and families. Let's ask God to give them the grace they need to discover and fulfill their beautiful, powerful vocation of being mirrors of God's self-forgetful love in this self-centered world.