I
posted this a year ago. It comes up again today. Look at it again, not just to
draw horrorific conclusions as to your parents, etc. and your own status but,
if true, what does this mean for the future of marriage and the ascetical and
then catechetical preparation for it.
“Pope says marriage
annulment process should be free of charge
BY FRANCIS X. ROCCA
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) January
24, 2015 — Addressing the Vatican tribunal primarily responsible for
hearing requests for marriage annulments, Pope Francis said all annulment
processes should be free of charge.
“The sacraments are free. The sacraments give us grace. And a
matrimonial process pertains to the sacrament of matrimony. How I wish that all
processes were free,” the pope said Jan. 24, at a meeting to inaugurate the
Roman Rota’s judicial year.
Pope Francis also said that, because contemporary culture
portrays marriage as a “mere form of emotional gratification,” people often
marry without a true understanding of the sacrament, meaning many such
marriages might actually be invalid.
“The judge, in pondering the validity of the consent expressed,
must take into account the context of values and of faith — or their presence
or absence — in which the intent to marry was formed. In fact, ignorance of the
contents of the faith could lead to what the code (of canon law) calls an error
conditioning the will. This eventuality is not to be considered rare as in the
past, precisely because worldly thinking often prevails over the magisterium of
the church,” the pope said.
The pope said judges in matrimonial cases should “determine if
there was an original lack of consent, either directly because of a lack of a
valid intention, or because of a grave lack of understanding of matrimony
itself, such as to condition the will. The crisis of marriage is, in fact, not
seldom at the root a crisis of conscience illuminated by faith.”
In August, Pope Francis established a commission to simplify and
streamline the marriage-annulment process. At the October Synod of Bishops on
the family, participants discussed the possibility of waiving fees. Archbishop
Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization,
told reporters that the purpose of such a measure would be to eliminate even
the “smallest suspicion” of a profit motive in church activities relating to a
sacrament.
The impact of the cultural context on the validity of marriages
is not a new concern.
Cardinal Gerhard Muller, prefect of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, wrote in the Vatican newspaper in October 2013: “Today’s
mentality is largely opposed to the Christian understanding of marriage, with
regard to its indissolubility and its openness to children. Because many
Christians are influenced by this, marriages nowadays are probably invalid more
often than they were previously.”
In July 2013, Pope Francis suggested that as many as half of all
Catholic marriages might be invalid, “because people get married lacking
maturity, they get married without realizing that it is a lifelong commitment,
they get married because society tells them they have to get married.”
In 2010, Pope Benedict XVI told an interviewer that “canon law
has taken it for granted that someone who contracts a marriage knows what
marriage is. Assuming the existence of this knowledge, the marriage is then
valid and indissoluble. But in the present confusion of opinions, in today’s
completely new situation, what people ‘know’ is rather that divorce is
supposedly normal. So we have to deal with the question of how to recognize
validity and where healing is possible.”
Now,
continue to the 1998 opinion of Cardinal Ratzinger that considers faith as
essential to all the sacraments, and without it, matrimony would not be a
sacrament, and therefore, not valid (and hence, annullable):
(…)
“Further study is required, however,
concerning the question of whether non-believing Christians — baptized persons
who never or who no longer believe in God — can truly enter into a sacramental
marriage. In other words, it needs to be clarified whether every marriage
between two baptized persons is ipso
facto a sacramental marriage. In fact, the Code states that only a
“valid” marriage between baptized persons is at the same time a sacrament (cf.
cic, can. 1055, § 2). Faith belongs to the essence of the sacrament; what
remains to be clarified is the juridical question of what evidence of the
“absence of faith” would have as a consequence that the sacrament does not come
into being. (3)
3 During the meeting with clergy in the Diocese
of Aosta, which took place 25 July 2005, Pope Benedict XVI spoke of this
difficult question: “those who were married in the Church for the sake of
tradition but were not truly believers, and who later find themselves in a new
and invalid marriage and subsequently convert, discover faith and feel excluded
from the Sacrament, are in a particularly painful situation. This really is a
cause of great suffering and when I was Prefect of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, I invited various Bishops’ Conferences and experts to
study this problem: a sacrament celebrated without faith. Whether, in fact, a
moment of invalidity could be discovered here because the Sacrament was found
to be lacking a fundamental dimension, I do not dare to say. I personally
thought so, but from the discussions we had I realized that it is a highly
complex problem and ought to be studied further. But given these people’s
painful plight, it must be studied further”.
[Introductory
comment: “In 1998 Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
introduced the volume: “On the Pastoral Care of the Divorced and Remarried”,
published by the Libreria Editrice Vaticana in the dicastery’s series
“Documenti e Studi”, 17. Because of its interest in our day and its breadth of
perspective, we reproduce the third part along with three additional notes.
This text is also available on the newspaper’s website
(www.osservatoreromano.va) in English, Italian, French, German, Portuguese and
Spanish.”]
* * * * * * *
Note:
Canon 1055 of the
1983 Code of Canon Law:
1) “The marriage covenant by which a man and a woman
establish between themselves a partnership of their whole life, and which of
its own very nature is ordered to the well-being of the spouses [the bonum
coniugum] and to the procreation and
upbringing of children, has between the baptized, been raised by Christ the
Lord to the dignity of a sacrament.”
2) Consequently, a
valid marriage contract cannot exist between baptized persons without its being
by that very fact a sacrament.
And according to the above, there cannot be a sacrament
without faith (understood as self-gift), and hence there could not be validity.
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