IS AN ANNULMENT WORTH ANYTHING IF IT IS SO SECRETIVE?

The Catholic Church performs marriages for couples and has been known to then declare after an investigation that no marriage in fact took place in reality.  It annuls the marriage. 

The annulments performed by the Church are never accepted as valid by the state.  If you need a state annulment you have to get one even if you have had a church annulment.  And the state and the Church will differ in their criteria of how a marriage can be deemed invalid.  So the Church performs marriages following annulment that are not recognised as valid by the state. It is utter hypocrisy of the Church to say that marriage is important for protecting relationships and children when the marriage is not protected by the law.

The Church rewards you for forcing somebody to marry you, for marrying in a register office for not having full sex with the spouse and for not meaning the vows with a second chance to wed.  The marriage is declared a fiction with only a Catholic marriage in a Catholic Church being considered real.  Belief in divorce is an impediment to marriage.

The Church keeps its reasons for annulling a marriage secret. Confidentiality lends it an excuse.  What if an annulment needs to be appealed? There is no appeals procedure in place. At least with divorce you can judge if the persons should have been granted a divorce decree for all is laid bare. The secrecy allows the Church to do what it wants and we do have seen cases where the Church annulled marriages under dubious circumstances for the rich and famous. An annulment is a declaration that no marriage took place for the husband or wife didn’t really intended properly to get married so what does this say about ordinations? Why not allow some of them to be annulled as well? It is all exploitation and political manipulation. Annulments are mostly back-door divorces and especially as the Church takes care to make sure the couple knows what they are doing and getting into before they get married (pre-marriage courses, meetings with the priest who will be officiating at the wedding etc.). They are dishonesty.

Dubious psychological grounds for granting an annulment are accepted despite the modern realisation that psychologists cannot be trusted except up to a point. For example, the Church accepts the bleat, "I wasn't a very mature person when I married", as justification for annulling a marriage if it seems to be the truth. People marry because of their feelings more than anything else. If their partner grew seventy years older overnight just before the wedding the wedding would soon be called off. Feelings change. They can disappear through time. A person can and will change and how you can feel about that person will also change. When marriage is so deeply based on how the pair feel now it is obvious that they are deceiving themselves by promising to love one another for life. No marriage could really be valid.

The Church has annulled lots of marriages and has won infamy for doing so for it is clear that it can annul nearly any marriage when it puts its mind to it. The disagreement about the grounds for annulment that exists in the world of lawyers and theologians is frightening.   No marriage is safe. Can anybody be blamed for wondering if they are married at all? The married couple may know best if their marriage should be annulled so it seems there is nothing to stop them ending the marriage even without a church declaration of nullity.

The pope, Benedict XVI, has condemned annulment tribunals for being too generous in doling out annulments. Then why doesn’t he set up a commission to examine their work and overturn some of these annulments?

If marriages can be annulled then annulments can be invalidated as well!

There is so much harmful and discriminatory nonsense taught by the Catholic Church in relation to marriage. People who teach absurd morals have no right to expect people to assume they are sincere. They should prove their sincerity by doing heroic good works. For example, if you are a priest or nun and encourage people to believe that it is better to catch killer sexually transmitted diseases than to protect with condoms, then if you are sincere you will be among the people who suffer the consequences of your doctrine helping them. The pope does nothing and lives in grandeur so we should do the decent thing and brand him as a bigoted despicable old hypocrite.

APOSTASY

It is Catholic teaching that a Catholic who apostasises from the faith cannot contract a Catholic marriage.  Apostasy is an impediment to marriage because the sacrament belongs to the people and a spouse who weds a secret apostate is being fooled by thinking she or he is marrying a real Catholic.  [Decretals of Gregory IX, IV, title 19, vi; (Friedberg, II, p. 722).