Showing the Truth

Once, there was a non-catholic who protested the process of Catholic annulment. She said that she did not want their marriage annulled, because she did not want her children to become illegitimate. This is a stunning misconception, but since it is said so often, I want to speak to it here. Let us ponder for a second what is being said. The person does not mind that her children have divorced parents, but somehow annulment is wrong. Divorce, which almost everyone knows about, and is (supposed to be) based on the failure of at least one parent to be faithful to the matrimonial commitment, is fine for the kids, but annulment is not?

Next, there is another layer here. The Catholic Church does not, and never has, annulled a marriage. Yes, you read that right. All that the Church does is to declare that they discovered a marriage already to be null and void. The declaration of nullity changes nothing. If the children were not illegitimate before, they will not be illegitimate after the annulment is declared. If the children were illegitimate, then the declaration of nullity only points that out. The tribunal, in the annulment process, is declaring what is already so; and thus nothing new comes from it.

This is one of the biggest differences between divorce and annulment. The first is intended to change the status of the people involved. The second is to discover what the status of the people involved actually is. In other words, when the tribunal "grants an annulment" what they are doing is saying that they have discovered a marriage to be invalid, and therefore not a true marriage. For the person who was concerned with her children becoming illegitimate, it is not the Church who made this happen. She and her "former" husband made these children illegitimate by the decisions they made to seek marital union when one or both of them were not yet free to do so.

Her complaint may very well have been an attempt to avoid blame for something that she knew was her fault in the first place. Whatever her reasoning was, the Catholic Church does not have that kind of power to dissolve a genuine sacrament. She merely searches for information, and when it is found, she lets all know what she has discovered. This all fits perfectly with what the Church always does: she seeks to show the world what the truth is, in everything.