Well, although I did not mean this to be about remarriage, it may boil down to it. Remarriage presents a very particular case in that it is not a temporary condition as are most other sins.
I do “agree with the lesson and the method”. When one sins it is one who drops from grace and only repentance can change that. But repentance from a second marriage (more so if it includes kids) is a greater evil that the sin itself, if it means destroying a family.
When one remarries, one is in a state of sin that one is not struggling or even intending to resolve. One is making a life choice that effectively results in a permanent state of sin. How can one consider oneself still a part of the church in this situation? And why would the church want such a person in her ranks?
I'm not so sure we have. As far as I can tell, there hasn't been automatic excommunication for remarriage without an annulment in the US since 1977. Right now the remedy is the same as that for missing Mass- repentance, confession and a resolve not to repeat the sin. In the case of remarriage, the sin is not so much the ceremony itself- but since the Church still recognizes the first marriage, any sexual activity in the second is considered to be adulterous. And the reason you can't just go to confession after each sexual encounter is because you would not have the resolve to not to repeat the sin.
I’m certain that’s true. But it doesn’t follow that annulments are now being granted for trivial reasons. Perhaps in the past not enough were granted ( or even asked for). .
According to Catholic teaching, baptism leaves an indelible mark on the soul that irrevocably transforms you into a Christian and a member of the church. Once that’s done, no action, no sin, no lack of repentence on your part can change that. You may be stubbornly in a state of mortal sin, but you’re still a part of the church, and the church is glad to welcome you back to full communion upon true repentence and submission on your part.
The church would still want you because the church realizes that it’s a church of sinners, and because, as Jesus put it, “The healthy have no need of a physician, but the sick. I come not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentence.”
It is this very same paternalistic, condescending attitude of the Roman Catholic hierarchy that is losing the church thousands of American communicants every year. It isn’t 1544 any more, and the peasants understand a lot more of the world around them than the Church Fathers seem to.
This was a RCC teaching for centuries, the RCC church uses the quote Jesus was to have said to Peter ,“what you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, what you loose on earth will be loosed in Heaven” As far as ScrIpture it wasn’t assembled until 300+ years when Constentine had all the bishops assembled to decide what writings were valid and which were not. Thus the New Testement was created.
Scripture and the church was not united until the council of Nicea, the bishop of Rome was then considered to be the head of the Christian church and it was until the split with the Orthodox in the year 1,000 A.D. So what ever is taught, read, learned or believed is a human thing so one chooses what human to believe about scripture or not, that is why Christianity is so divided.
I personally believe that at the Last Supper, when Jesus was quoted as saying this is my body and this is my blood ,he meant life was food and drink, since it was not really his body but bread, and wine not blood, at most it could have only been symbolic.
I beleive the trouble with the second marriage is the vows, God has always taken the spoken word as very serious and binding. Extramarital Sex is a separate sin.
I’m not sure about RCC teachings, but there are 2 baptisms, water & fire (fire being the indwelling of the Holy Spirit), does the RCC acknowledge this? If so which baptism leaves a indelible mark? The way I take it is these are 3 separate events Baptism by water, Fire and sealed by God (which I assume is the indelible mark).
From what I understand, the annulment is justified in that the church authorities have determined that a marriage was not actually in place and thus the parties to the purported marriage are, in fact, free to enter into a church-approved marriage. I’m more than willing to be corrected on that as, to me, it would leave the status in doubt of any children born during the annulled marriage.
How do they figure it was never actually in place? That’s the part that astounds me. They were in love, they married of their own accord, they had massive sex, they produced little catholics. How could the church possibly ignore/justify that? They don’t account for “growing apart”, but that is the truth of the matter in nearly all cases.
Just FYI, no, the children of an annulled marriage are considered legitimate children by everyone, include the Roman Catholic church. (My source is a book I read called This Is Catholicism, which has the “Nihil Obstat” and imprimatur of the bishop of the priest who wrote it.
One of the circumstances that can justify an annullment is that they did not marry of their own accord - compulsion or coercion of one of the partners is one of the bases for annullment.
But marriage in this context - not all contexts, this one - is a contract, and the Catholic church believes that one or more of the necessary conditions for a valid contract has not been met.
Suppose you entered into a different contract with someone to buy a car. You hand over the money, he gives you the car, and you drive it around for six months. Then you find out that the guy who sold it to you stole the car. The contract of sale is therefore null and void, even though you have the car in your possession and have been driving it. Same same - the Catholic church considers that there are certain necessary conditions that have to be met before a valid marriage can be contracted. If they find that one or more of the conditions were not met, then no marriage took place.
It’s not all that different from other kinds of contracts. Traci Lords made porno videos before she was legally of age. Ownership of those videos is not legitimate, because one of the conditions of creating a licit porno video was not met, even if you bought the thing in good faith and have owned it for a long time. The contract between the producer and Traci Lords, thus, is more or less “annulled”.
The statement that suggested it was “the usual advice is to " live as brother and sister " while seeking an annulment of the previous marriage.” The fact that it’s the usual advice suggests a degree of reliability in obtaining annulments.
Hmmmm…but this situation would be a bit different. This would be more like buying a car and then in a year deciding that you don’t like the color anymore…or maybe you now need a bigger car. That doesn’t negate the fact that you liked it and it performed as advertised for a given period of time.
According the Richard John Neuhaus (himself a convert), in Catholic Matters, two hundred thousand adults join the RCC every year in America. I personally know seven adult converts (and myself), and I wouldn’t characterize any of us as ignorant peasants. Two professors, three post-grad students, and me and my husband, who may admittedly bring the tone down a little.
Regarding spiritual communion:
So while you cannot receive the Host, you can receive efficacious grace through spiritual communion.
Regarding the two baptisms, I believe the RCC separates those into baptism (washing away of Original Sin and bringing the child into the Church) and Confirmation (receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit through chrism).
Or like business partners working together for years, turning their partnership into a corporation, gaining additional investors - then one day discovering that they’d filed one piece of paper in their original partnership documents improperly. Does the whole thing go kablooey? Of course not - they go on as before, while filing a corrected document with the court.
But that’s what happened to Rudy Giuliani’s first marriage. He and his first wife married in the RCC in 1968, but by 1975 they’d ‘grown apart’ sufficiently that she didn’t accompany him to D.C. when he got a position at DoJ. By 1982, he’d met Donna Hanover and wanted to marry her, and discovered that he and his first wife had been second cousins rather than third cousins as they claim to have believed. So he and his first wife filed for annulment on those grounds, since second cousins need a (easily obtainable, AFAICT) special dispensation to be married in the RCC.
The RCC, in its infinite wisdom, tossed out the marriage on a technicality. All parties - husband, wife, Church, state - had believed the marriage was real. But when it became inconvenient for the partners to stay together, the Church, rather than letting them break apart and form new marriages, pretended they’d never had a marriage to begin with. What God has joined together, let no man rend asunder - so we’ll pretend God never joined you in the first place.
I guess that’s one way to preserve the sanctity of marriage.
The church is supposed to be a church of stumbling sinners, not resolute ones. It is ok for a member of the NRA to wake up one day and want to wash the car instead of go shoot something. But when you wake up convinced that guns are evil and that nobody should ever fire another gun, then you are not so much NRA material anymore. You shouldn’t want to remain a member, and they should not want you to remain a member. It doesn’t matter that you like their clubhouse and that they need your membership dues. It is a relationship that cannot bring anything good to happen.
I am all for the hope of redemption, but there are limits to hope. When the price of that redemption is an even greater sin (that of abandoning your second family), one cannot hope for it. This second marriage is not something that will not resolve itself for the good of all.
Well, no, it’s not. The legal basis for annullments is that one or more of the necessary conditions for forming a sacramental marriage did not exist, and that therefore no sacrament occured. Certainly there are abuses of the system, but that does not change the basis for the Catholic rationale.
) does not invalidate the premise.