I thought annulments were for churches that don't do divorces.

Just pretend the marriage really wasn't real.....

My brother had an annulment .... very weird....

Regards

Rita

I agree Rita.  Do churches even 'do' divorces?  There's the legal aspect (are annulments a legal thing in Canada?) and then the religious one.  I've never really heard of a church divorce :)

Legally you are never married, married, widowed or divorced (the vast majority of the time, there may be legal annulments still but that would be very rare and under specific circustances where for some reason the marriage is legally declared invalid).  Churches may have opinions on divorce but churches do not decide divorces.

 

In some religious traditions (most commonly Roman Catholic) a legal divorce is not enough to declare you available for remarriage.  Because of the high (sacramental) view of marriage there is a need for the church to dissolve the marriage in its own way.  And so you seek an annulment following the rubrics of the particuar tradition.  An annulment makes teh spurious (imo) claim that the marriage never actually existed and would (in a society which paid close attention) mean that any children of the relationship are illegitimate.

 

Churches don't "do divorces." Divorce is a legal concept. The state recognizes marriages; the state ends marriages - from a legal perspective. There can be secular "annulments" that can be recognized by the government if it's discovered that for some reason the original marriage was invalid.

 

Religious annulment is a largely Roman Catholic concept. In the Catholic Church, marriage is a sacrament. Annulment basically says that in fact no valid sacrament took place, and therefore the marriage (in a spiritual/canon law sense) never happened. Again, there are various grounds for annulment, many of them similar to the valid reasons for a secular annulment, some different.

 

Roman Catholic canon law also provides that in most cases children born of parents who later have their marriage annulled are not illegitimate.

Thanks!  I thought of it as being Catholic too, but I recently found out that other churches do the same thing.

 

Out of curiosity, which ones? I've never heard of it outside the Catholic context (save for the rare secular ones that Gord and Steven mentioned).

 

Mendalla

 

Anglican, and one protestant denomination that wasn't really specified.

My brother was married in the UCC; had a child; later divorced.  Then a good many years later, wanted to marry a woman who was Catholic.  He (and I, as some weird sort of testifying witness) had to present at the Roman Catholic admin offices in Toronto to have the official annulment before he could be remarried.   Bunch of bureaucratic nonsense IMO.  I believe there were hefty fees involved to get the necessary paperwork.  They didn't even get married in an RC church, and I don't think the presider was RC either, but his wife to be worked in the RC school board, so it all needed to happen somehow.  I may be vague on a few details - it was about 20 years ago. 

That's strange Carolla- Officially for the Catholic church to reconize a marriage the wedding needs a priest-or designate there- so Your brother was not married the first time in the eyes of the Catholic church.

Was he required to become Catholic for his second marriage?

I don't think he was required to 'convert' to RC Tabitha, but he did have to agree to the children being raised in that faith I think.  It is all pretty strange and inconsistent seeming!  He was legally married - so maybe that was the issue?  But it was weird to go to the RC officials to have the anullment processed when they hadn't been involved in the marriage.  I quit trying to make sense of some of that stuff a while ago!

 

As a theologian who happens to be Catholic (married to a UCC minister) I can shed a bit of light on Catholic annulments under the understanding that I am not a canon lawyer. An annulment does not 'dissolve' a marriage or indicate that the marriage never happened. An annulment simply indicates that the requirements for a sacramental marriage were not present or were impeded. For instance, if one of the partners’ coherenced the other into marriage, then the cohereced party did not make the sacramental vows of their own free will. It is the 'sacrament' that is annulled, not the marriage. As for people married in other traditions, the Catholic Church accepts marriages in other traditions as 'sacramental.' Therefore if one partner in an interchruch marriage was married in the United Church, following the United Church's polity for marriage and subsequently divorced, then they would require an annulment, for their marriage to a Catholic to be recognized by the RCC as sacremental. One way to think of an annulment is to first recognize that there are two things going on at a Church wedding, regardless of the denomination. The first is a legal, civil arrangement or contract between two people. In this instance, the presiding minister/priest is acting on behalf of the state to ensure that the legal requirements of the state are met, in fact, in Ontario, all ministers have a marriage number that is registered with the government of Ontario for this purpose. The second thing going on is the religious element of the marriage, which for some traditions is considered a sacrament. Here the presiding minister is witnessing on behalf of their respective community and blessing the union of the couple being married. In those communities that recognize seven sacraments, this is the sacramental part of the marriage. The presiding priest is there to witness to the best of his ability that the conditions for a sacrament are met.  Marriage is the only sacrament that is administered by those receiving the sacrament (ie the couple). All other sacraments involve a priest, or in the case of holy orders, a bishop, invoking the sacrament on the recipient through an external sign (ie water at baptism, oil at confirmation, laying on of hands at ordination). It is the couple in the case of marriage who are the external sign of the sacrament and impart the sacrament of marriage on one another as they profess their vows. It is this sacramental rather than the civil, characteristic of marriage that is annulled in the Roman Catholic tradition.  This does not 'annul' the marriage per se, or say it never happened, but simply acknowledges that the conditions necessary for a valid sacrament were deficient or missing.

Ever been around a divorced couple who do not have a good word to say about it each and yet won’t keep quiet either?  Ever want to scream, “Get over it already” or “You are not together”.

 

It can seem that way sometimes with Protestants and Roman Catholics, some times. It is something I do not entirely get. I can say I am not Jewish or no longer am Jewish without feeling a need to take swipes. I am not a recipient of swipes either.

 

There are those who were Roman Catholic and hurt by the Roman Catholic Church and one can understands their pain or anger. There are those who left and their leaving is still raw and fresh.

 

For the others, well….

 

It can seem that some still have a beef all these years after Reformation and it is ugly and it creeps into discussions. It is not enough to simply "not be one", but sometimes one is misinformed, buying into myths, deliberately ignorant, nasty or critical of the other.

 

Is it to be “right”? Is it to be “validated”? What is it? Is it simply the result of years of animosity and religious prejudice?

 

There is a difference between ecclesiastical (or canon law) and civil laws. Few debate that this should not be the case. It may be because one supported equal marriage before the civil law did. It may be because one does not support equal marriage. It may simply be that one wants the freedom to practice their religion. Some denominations respect civil law on the matter or marriage and divorce and some do not. Some believe pastors are officers of the court when presiding over marriage ceremonies and assure the marriage was done within the laws of the land and that marrige is dissolved by the same laws of the land. Are we saying that canon law and civil law should be one and the same? That churches should be forced to respect civil law? Laws they disagree with?

 

Since marriage is a sacrament in Catholicism, it follows that if it is to be “undone” it must be “undone” as it was done, in the church by the church. At least, it follows that it would have to be to be valid in the eyes of the church.

 

We do not see marriage as a sacrament, if we did? Then IMO we would rightly have to deal with divorce within our framework. It would be in The Manual.

 

One can disagree with whether marriage should be a sacrament without saying that another group says it wasn’t “real” or that it “never existed”.

 

That is not true. I know many Catholics who would never deny their ex or that relationship, the marriage or children from that marriage.  The marriage was annulled. The marriage was real and happened.

 

If at the time of the child’s birth, the parents were legally married, legitimacy is established. It is not a retroactive thing. You cannot restore virginity and you cannot retroactively change a child’s legitimacy. They were and always are legitimate in church law. Annulment is about the spouses and the church, not the children.

If a marriage is legally annuled, does it still have to be annulled by churches that do them?

SG, I'm a little confused as I was referring to both Catholic and protestant churches fairly equally on this matter.  I'm just more familiar with this occuring in Catholic churches and hadn't come across this otherwise until recently.

thanks for that explanation theolog3n1 - I found it helpful. 

I don't think there is such a thing as a legal annulment. I think that to legally end a marriage the couple have to divorce.
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Annulment is a church word - it means that the sacrament of marriage was interfered with in some way.
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I once attended a wedding where I don't think the sacramental element was present.
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The groom had lived with the girl's mother for several years, and sexually abused the girl.
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When the girl was a teen the mother deserted the family, leaving the girl with the man who had been her father-figure and her abuser in an isolated, rural area.
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The man got sick and fearing death decided that the only thing that would save him from burning in hell would be to get married.
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The girl, now chronologically an adult, although far from an adult either socially or emotionally, invited me to her wedding. They were married in a small independent church.
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Several years later I assisted the girl in escaping to a women's shelter. Eventually she got a legal divorce. She felt guilty because her church didn't allow divorce. I assured her that, since she had no choice at the time, I didn't consider it to have been a marriage. She felt better about that. A few years later she married in a UCC. No annulment required.

I don't know about Canada, but remember this story:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3366529.stm

 

Theolog, I agree with Beloved, thanks for the explaination!

 

Seeler, that's sad.  When it comes to something like that I would hope the officiant would just refuse to preside over the ceremony.  I guess there's always someone out there who will do it though.  Did they use the 'speak now or forever hold your peace' line at the wedding?

 

In Quebec, the Civil Code provides for annulment (or nullity) of marriage; from a quick look, it seems as though this falls under the annulling of a contract since marriage is a contract.

 

For the rest of Canada, I found this

 http://www.canadiandivorcelaws.com/annulment/

which  seems to indicate that annulment is possible although there is not enough identification of the source to know with what authority the statements are made.

 

 

There is, indeed, such a thing as a legal annulment. Not being a lawyer I don't know all the technical legal language, but if a marriage is entered into in such a way that it violates the laws regarding marriage, and if that was unknown at the time that the legal authority solemnized the marriage, then a marriage can be annulled in most jurisdictions.

 

An example would be a forced marriage. If it was found that one individual was forced to marry another then the marriage can be annulled by the state with no divorce necessary.

Yes.  Remember that civil marriage is a separate thing from the sacrament of marriage....

 

Thanks, I wasn't sure if it would just automatically lead to both being annulled.

Have you ever heard of a church marrying a couple if they couldn't legally be married?

 

Only in churches that consider marriage a sacrament. Since it's not a sacrament in the United Church, we also don't annul marriages.

 

We used "bless" same sex "commitments" (that's what we could legally call them) and I'm pretty sure Metropolitan did, too. Not sure if anyone in the UCCan was doing it though it wouldn't surprise. We certainly regarded them as married, even if the state didn't.

 

That said, as a non-sacramental faith, marriage in UU'ism does not mean much more than an acknowledgement of the relationship by the community of faith and a chance for the couple to publicly profess their love and intention to be a couple for the long-haul. There is no need for annulment, in other words, because the marriage isn't some special, divinely ordained bond to start with. Much like the UCCan, as I understand it from upthread. since you don't regard marriage as a sacrament.

 

Mendalla

 

 

If one or both of the parties were or are Roman Catholic and wish to remarry, yes. Legal annullment is fairly rare and might involve imparied consent or bigamy on the part of one or both parties. The Marriage Act in the various provinces generally says that if both parties entered into the legal marriage in good faith then it is valid and therefore can only be ended by a legal divorce. That's why a couple married by an unqualified officiant (there were about 500 or so in Ontario last year, aparently) do not require remarriage.   

 

Not if the pastor knew about it. If the pastor knew about it, they would be legally responsible. If a marriage license was issued, the issuing clerk would have a lot of 'splainin' to do  to the government. Either that or if the applicats lied,  they would be in some serious legal difficulty.

 

I don't believe that a pastor would actually be in any legal trouble, provided that no marriage license was mailed back to be registered with the government. The government probably doesn't really care what the church does with marriage internally. So we could "marry" same sex couples before same sex couples were legal if we wanted to and the church could consider the couple married; the marriages just couldn't be registered and wouldn't be recognized by the government. Similarly, I don't think it would be a legal issue if there were a church that believed in bigamy whose pastors performed bigamous marriages, provided that no one tried to actually register the marriages. It would be at the point of the issuance of the license (by the municipal clerk) or of the sending of the licence for registration (by the officiant) that the marriage would become a nullity. 

I never thought of that, but it seems completely obvious now that you've pointed it out.  Thanks!

As an Anglican, from a (reasonably) 'orthodox' (high Anglican?) church, I have NEVER heard of an Anglican getting an 'anulment'; it's certainly not a barrier to re-marriage in that particular congregation.

It's probably closer to a personal wish to 'make it all go away'.

Unless the marriage was by Banns. I remember The Rev. Dr. Cheri Di Novo, MPP for High Park making an impassioned plea to Toronto Conference Executive before equal marriage was legal that United Church ministers should perform same-sex marriages by banns. To which my silent response was "No..."  

 

Good point. I hadn't thought about banns. All these years I've never been asked to do a wedding by banns.

I requested that banns be published in the bulletin and read in church for three weeks before my saughter's first wedding - even though she had a marriage license.  A month later the chair of the board did the same for his daughter's wedding. 

That's called customary banns. They have no legal status.

yes...I remember Banns announced in the church...but that's years ago now.

 

Ontario (afaik) still allows the reading of Banns in lieu of a license as long as some very specific criteria [criteria that no couple I havew ever married would have met] are met.  Do other provinces?

I remember the banns being read also martha :)

 

I believe they do. Banns take the place of the license. The other criteria is that both parties be members of the church. I have performed a wedding by Banns as recently as ten years ago. The Form of Publication of Banns was not included in Celebrate God's Presence, I think, but it was in the 1968 Blue service book.

In Ontario at least, the parties to a marriage that is done under the authority of publishing banns don't have to be "members" of any church. They simply have to be "in the habit of attending worship." They don't even have to attend the same church.

 

 

From the Ontario Marriage Act, Section 17.1:

 

Where a marriage is to be solemnized under the authority of the publication of banns, the intention to marry shall be proclaimed openly in an audible voice during divine service,

(a) where the parties are in the habit of attending worship at the same church, being within Canada, at that church; or

(b) where the parties are in the habit of attending worship in different churches, being within Canada, in each such church. R.S.O. 1990, c. M.3, s. 17 (1).

 

 

The parties have to meet all other legal requirements to be married under banns, and one difference is that a marriage can't be performed under banns if either party is divorced or have a marriage that has been otherwise annulled.

 

 

Licence Requirements

In Saskatchewan, couples who want to marry must purchase a Saskatchewan Marriage Licence. This law came into effect on October 1, 1992.

The Marriage Amendment Act, 1992 eliminates the "publication of Banns" form as a prerequisite to marriage. Banns are the public announcement of a proposed marriage. Banns may still be read for religious purposes.