My sister-in-law claims that she couldn’t get her first marriage annulled because it cost “a lot” of money to do so. Her grounds were his (serial?) infidelity and hard drug addiction, neither of which was apparently known before the marriage.
Is there a standard fee for an annulment? Is it more like a varying fee depending on how complex the situation is? (And can it be contested by the ex?) This would have been done in suburban Chicago about 15 years ago.
(My only experience with anything on the subject is my own pre-Cana counseling before marrying my Catholic husband, and the actual wedding in his church. He said that some time afterwards he was asked to pay some kind of annual “family” rate for church membership/support/something, even though only he was attending and it was known that I wasn’t converting. This was the same church that would have handled the annulment for my SIL. So I don’t know if these money issues are standard for the Catholic Church in the US, or if this is how this church has such frequent and lavish building projects.)
An annulment is a judicial proceeding in the church. There is a tribunal, a lawyer for the “defense” of the marriage bond, and a lawyer for the party seeking annulment. Like any other legal case, it can get more expensive the more complex it is. The other party to the marriage has an absolute right to contest the annulment.
Every diocese does things a bit differently, but in general, there are basic fees along with a sliding scale to assist those unable to afford those fees. But the more complex the case, the bigger the expense.
Serial infidelity could certainly be grounds, assuming it can be shown that at the time of the marriage, he had no intention of treating the marriage with faithful behavior. If he entered into the marriage with pure and clear intentions, and only later began his straying ways, this would not be available.
Hard core drug addicition, if unknown at the time of marriage, might present a case for annulment if at the time of consent, the addict was unable to fulfill the obligations of marriage because of his addiction and the other party was unaware of this.
It’s a little tangential to the discussion, but are there any pronounced differences in annulment procedures between the RC and the Anglican churches? The Anglican priest who was the celebrant at my first marriage had an annulment from his own first wife, but he never really explained why he had to do so.
Mine - twenty years ago and uncontested, in St. Paul, Minnesota, cost $100 or so. Not a lot. I didn’t get the impression this was a profit center for the church.
Mine was done by a nun who was a cannon lawyer. Interesting person.
As Bricker said, the problems are supposed to exist in some form at the time of the sacrament. But I think the Church will take pity on an innocent spouse and usually grant an annulment even if “intentions were initially pure” by stating that the “seed” of addiction or infidelity was there. At least, that is what my nun indicated.
My first husband applied to annul our marriage and was denied. We had been together 17 years and married for 10 of those years, and then he met his “soulmate”. We divorced, and he wanted to marry his soulmate in the Church. He did not have valid grounds for the annulment, so he just said “for whatever grounds the Church may determine”. It was a very stressful and painful process for me to go through, and the Church denied his request because there were no grounds. He did appeal the denial, so I had to go through it all over again. And his appeal was also denied. In the copy of the letter the Church sent to him, it said the appeal decision was final, unless he could come up with additional evidence not already shown to support a claim for annulment. So, according to the Church, we are still married fifteen years later.
PS: His soulmate dumped him a year after our divorce
I think she may have been simplyfying things a bit… or perhaps the particular tribunal she dealt with were willing. But by the letter of the law, no – there had to be some evidence for the defect existing at the time of marriage or the judges were not permitted to reach that finding.
And not to be nitpicky, but… unless she was dealing with artillery, she was a canon lawyer.
Yeah, I don’t have any idea whether there was any hint of it, just that apparently the estimated cost would be too much for her. Maybe she figured the efforts of getting proof of his ill intent might cause trouble or be difficult as well. She remarried in another (not RC) church recently.
One of the doctors that I work for left her now-ex-husband within two weeks of getting married, and got both divorce and annulment. He’d been claiming “cold feet” on and off in their courtship, they went to couples counseling at her request, everything seemed fine after, and shortly after returning from the honeymoon she caught him having sex with her best friend, who was also her maid of honor. I gather this was the real source of his “cold feet.” A case like that sounds pretty open-and-shut.
Are you saying that alcoholism is not grounds for Catholic annulment if the addiction is present at the time of the marriage and the other party in unaware of it? That would seem to fall under either section 2 or 3 of the canon law you quoted in your OP.
Ted Kennedy’s annulment decree is not public information, as you well know. However, Joan Kennedy later claimed he asked for it on the grounds that he never intended to be faithful to her. Which may be even funnier than the alcoholism theory that has been widely reported (although never properly sourced).
This being GQ, I wonder what evidence you relied upon in making the subsequent, confident, Dio-like denial?
This raises an interesting side point, for those interested in civil procedure.
In the world of U.S. civil law, there’s a concept called res judicata, a legal bar to continued relitigation of a claim after a final judgement has been reached. In canon law, a claim may generally be relitigated upon discovery of new evidence. (Numerous caveats not presented here unless anyone’s masochistically interested).
But I offered the absolute certainty of my statement because alcoholism alone is not grounds for an annulment. True, if the alcoholism was not known AND it caused her to be unable at the time of consent to fulfill the obligations of marriage, that might support an anullment – but the annulment would be on the grounds of being unable at the time of consent to fulfill the obligations of marriage. The alcoholism might be EVIDENCE of that inability, but I hope you can see the huge gap between that standard and the unvarnished claim that alcoholism was the grounds.
In contrast, Joan’s claim does set forth adequate grounds of an annulment. We don’t know if it’s true, but it’s certainly possible as matter of canon law. (I take no position on its inherent humor).
“Alcoholism” is not grounds; at most it is supporting evidence for the grounds of inability to fulfill the obligations of marriage.
Of course, presumably the tribunal will recognize that such testimony would be self-serving, and require more in the way of extrinsic evidence, but there’s no bar to the claim.
Unfortunately, I don’t know much about Anglican/Episcopal annulment rulings. Perhaps Elendil’s Heir or Northern Piper might be able to fill in the gap.
I wasn’t aware that the Anglicans had a system of tribunals which would consider and rule on nullity cases.
In England, the ecclesiastical courts (which were both church courts and fully binding courts of the land) used to do this, but in the mid nineteenth-century all cases to do with marriage were moved to the High Court, which is an ordinary civil court. It’s my impression that the church continued to accept and act on rulings of the High Court in nullity matters – i.e. if you got an annulment in the High Court, you could remarry in the Church of England. And presumably that’s still the case.
To some extent this is a function of the place of the church as the established church, which of course the Episcopalian church never was in the US, but I think it’s also consistent with a generally protestant/lutheran approach to church-state relationships. It wouldn’t amaze me to discover that the Episcopalian church was generally willing to remarry someone who had had a civil annulment, and that this was a long-standing position. If so, there would be no need for church tribunals to address the issue.
It is interesting that none of the conditions for an invalid marriage have anything to do with love. I guess it’s like the old song “what’s love got to do with it”.
Oh, I think we all know that it’s quite possible to love somebody, and still be unable to sustain a functioning relationship with them. The conditions for divorce in the civil courts have nothing to do with love, either. (For that matter, the requirements for marriage in civil law have nothing to do with love.)
