{"id":19534,"date":"2014-08-05T06:00:20","date_gmt":"2014-08-05T10:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=19534"},"modified":"2014-08-04T21:24:31","modified_gmt":"2014-08-05T01:24:31","slug":"half-of-marriages-arent-valid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2014\/08\/half-of-marriages-arent-valid\/","title":{"rendered":"Half of marriages aren’t valid?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Roman Catholics don\u2019t believe in divorce.\u00a0 But they do allow for annulments<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 These involve ecclesiastical tribunals that rule that a valid marriage never existed in the first place.\u00a0 If it was determined that a couple was too young and didn\u2019t know what they were doing or that they didn\u2019t understand the Catholic theology of marriage, their marriage could be declared invalid.\u00a0 Despite receiving the sacrament of marriage in their wedding, despite living together for decades, despite having children and raising them to adulthood, they weren\u2019t really married, thus ratifying their civil divorce and allowing them to marry someone else.<\/p>\n

Catholics who do get a divorce and remarry without an annulment (which is a very expensive and time-consuming process) incur automatic excommunication, meaning that they are not allowed to receive Holy Communion.\u00a0 This affects lots of people, as you can imagine, and cuts seriously into church attendance.\u00a0 So the church is reconsidering its practice, trying to find a way to allow remarried people to take Communion.<\/p>\n

\n

A leader of that effort is the retired German archbishop Cardinal Walter Kasper, who, in the course of an interview in Commonweal Magazine, dropped this bombshell that, strangely, has drawn little attention: \u201cI\u2019ve spoken to the pope himself about this, and he said he believes that 50 percent of marriages are not valid.\u201d<\/p>\n

From Merciful God, Merciful Church | Commonweal Magazine<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve spoken to the pope himself about this, and he said he believes that 50 percent of marriages are not valid. Marriage is a sacrament. A sacrament presupposes faith. And if the couple only want a bourgeois ceremony in a church because it\u2019s more beautiful, more romantic, than a civil ceremony, you have to ask whether there was faith, and whether they really accepted all the conditions of a valid sacramental marriage\u2014that is, unity, exclusivity, and also indissolubility.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Half of all people who think they are married aren\u2019t really married?\u00a0 In context, it would appear that the pope was referring to the marriages of Catholics\u2013though by the standards referred to, it would appear that no non-Catholics can be married\u2013but think about this.\u00a0 My wife and I were arguably too young and didn\u2019t know what we were doing, so, if we were Catholic, are we not married, even though we are now old and knowledgeable?<\/p>\n

Imagine a Catholic couple who just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.\u00a0 If they married back then for \u201cbourgeois\u201d reasons\u2013they wanted to be respectable; all of their friends were doing it; a church wedding is \u201cromantic\u201d\u2013their marriage, if the Cardinal is correct, is invalid.\u00a0 So they have been living in sin for 50 years.\u00a0 Their children are technically illegitimate.\u00a0 In the Catholic accounting system that numbers every sin, they have committed countless acts of fornication.\u00a0 One would hope that when they die, the couple could expiate their sins by a few thousand years in the fires of Purgatory, but it\u2019s hard to avoid the conclusion that, in terms of Roman Catholic soteriology, dying with so many mortal sins unconfessed without due penitence would land them both in Hell.<\/p>\n

Note too how Lutherans actually have a higher view of the Sacraments than Catholics.\u00a0 Cardinal Kasper says that \u201ca sacrament presupposes faith,\u201d so that if a couple didn\u2019t have faith in the sense of a full\u00a0 understanding of the Catholic theology of marriage, the sacrament wasn\u2019t efficacious.\u00a0 Whereas Lutherans believe that a Sacrament creates faith.\u00a0 For Lutherans, marriage is not a Sacrament but a Vocation, but the external word (\u201cI now pronounce you husband and wife\u201d; \u201cWhat God has joined together let not man put asunder\u201d) leaves no doubt that a marriage has, in fact, been entered into.\u00a0 Also, to the point at issue, whereas Catholics believe you have to be, in effect, sinless in order to receive the Sacraments, Lutherans believe that the Sacraments are for sinners <\/em>and that they convey Christ\u2019s forgiveness of sins.<\/em><\/p>\n

Test your marriage by measuring your wedding day by the grounds for annulment <\/a>in the Catholic Church.<\/p>\n

HT:\u00a0 Ross Douthat<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roman Catholics don\u2019t believe in divorce.\u00a0 But they do allow for annulments.\u00a0\u00a0 These involve ecclesiastical tribunals that rule that a valid marriage never existed in the first place.\u00a0 If it was determined that a couple was too young and didn\u2019t know what they were doing or that they didn\u2019t understand the Catholic theology of marriage, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,16,47],"tags":[170,1381,2481,1919],"class_list":["post-19534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church","category-family","category-theology","tag-annulments","tag-marriage","tag-pope-francis","tag-roman-catholicism"],"yoast_head":"\nHalf of marriages aren't valid?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Roman Catholics don't believe in divorce.\u00a0 But they do allow for 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