Expert: Donald Higby - 1/22/2012

Question
QUESTION: I’m a practising Catholic with a query about my existing marriage, of now 20 years. I’ve an unusual dilemma on the topic of annulment to which I can find no answer.
Prior to meeting my wife I was engaged to be married, she left me and I was devastated. Utterly shattered me and I was the classic broken hearted individual. I’ve never really recovered and I still love the girl. I maintained communication with her on and off over the next 20 years. We were and still are very good friends, she never married. I think essentially at the time wasn’t really mature enough  for marriage, possibly still the case.
Around 2 years later I met my wife, when we married 2 years later, she was 21 and I was 30. Our 1st child arrived 11 months later.
I had sexual relations with my wife before marring.  At around the 2-3 month period of our going out together I wanted to get out of the relationship, my wife did have another relationship before we met and she was not a virgin. But I did very much feel and even knew that her heart was never given to the guy in that previous relationship and that I had really taken her virginity and her heart. At the time I felt very much accountable for following through with marrying the girl. Around the 14 month period of courtship I was quite forceful in trying to promote my reasons for calling the marriage and engagement off.  Predominantly because I didn’t really want to marry her, there were too many issues with her nature that I knew I’d have to tolerate, or in the marriage itself try and impose issues  that could likely go against her nature and I just thought this is dangerous to her and myself.
I really did spend a good 4-6 months pushing back to see if she would/could detach herself from me. I wanted her to voluntarily withdraw I did not just discard her or sever the relationship, I think also due to the tragic error of incorporating a sexual relationship before marriage this young women was very much and absolutely in her mind and heart committed to me for marriage and the rest of her life.  
What eventuated in myself when I really forced the conversations relating to a departing, (one on one with her) on a number of occasions, was an immense and overwhelming brokenness from her and she literally was breaking up inside, I don’t blame her for that nor do I look down to her in anyway as being, less then, for responding or reacting as she did. I had done wrong by her, absolutely. But what sustained my sole reason for continuing with our commitment to marriage was sympathy and compassion for her heart and her person. It was and still is one of the most painful experiences of my life when I contemplate looking at her and attempting to console her, all that was going through my head was my own pain from my own previous relationship and how devastating that was to me. And now I was inflicting the same onto this woman I purported to love.  What kept coming into my head and heart was “you have to stop it” ‘make it stop here’, and love this women in compassion love her. That is the reason I married this girl out of compassion for her and what I might have otherwise done to her heart and possibly her life if I left her and didn’t marry her. I kept this silent and told no one and most definitely not her nor did I ever even insinuate it.
Now all that may sound like lunacy, mental instability or whatever. None of it I’ve ever told anyone excepting one priest about 18 months ago. That is the situation. Still now I would persevere with our relationship. But after nearly two years of her almost dislike of any advances I made towards her and no sex what so ever, which I have yielded to, she has now left me and with quite a few children none of which are living with me.  She ‘seems’ much happier and I am pleased for her. We are courteous and respectful of each other and I have no real restrictions on having access to the kids.
I’m tearing myself apart with what has happened and the whole fiasco, I blame myself 100% for.
Possibly in selfishness I want someone else, I want to love a women who will love me. I’m not dating but I want to.
But that is silly if I can’t validly be entitled to an annulment. The added issue is this, if I am entitled to an annulment I would have to disclose in detail what I have just told you, I’ve no evidence about what was going on my mind and heart, but that is, the painful truth. Finally I’m concerned I’d possibly have to disclose all this to my wife if I were entitled to an annulment and once again it shatters me to think about possibly disclosing that to her, and if there were a way to avoid it in an annulment process I would.  
Are these grounds for an Annulment?  I would be most grateful if you could please shed some light on my situation.
The other problem is this; in my own mind I say, ‘that is your lot’, close your mouth and take the pain and live the cross. You (I) have become a celibate and I must use this situation for penance for my own sins and the sins of the world and it needs to be offered to Christ with voluntary free will and personal consent. But even if I did that… is the marriage still valid if I went into it predominantly focusing on the sacrament of marriage as a personal sacrifice and a feeble attempt, at being honourable to the girl, but out of compassion for her?

ANSWER: You seem to have a good understanding of what the church teaches, and I applaud your commitment to remain faithful to her teachings.  It seems to me that you may have grounds for annulment.  You sound as though you entered the bond of marriage under some degree of coercion, given your wife's emotional state.  Of course you have no way of proving how you felt at the time, or the pressure you were under, but that isn't really a deal-breaker.  The best thing is to make an appointment with someone on the marriage tribunal of your diocese.  Lay out what you mentioned above.  See what that person thinks.  The process of obtaining an annulment is very private.  Since you and your wife are no longer together, you might have to get a civil divorce as well.  (Even if the church granted an annulment, you would have to have a civil divorce before you could marry again).  Finally, you didn't mention whether you and she were both Catholic and married in the Catholic church.  
I hope you will start the process and see where it leads.  Hope this helps.

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QUESTION: We both were at marriage and both still are practising Catholics.
I don’t really understand how the church could give me an annulment when historically it has said (pre VII) it is forever no matter what? That rule existed for longer than what’s available now. The struggle in me, is historically there has been some horrific marriages within the church that have …. in the end… quite likely been the salvation of one or both individuals. I struggle with that really … do you just unrelentingly persevere in silence and endure? I mean isn’t that what the church really requires one to voluntarily embrace if it befalls you as Arch Sheen says ‘Pain is Gods megaphone’, this life does not guarantee happiness ‘it is not a right’ one has.  Do we not have an obligation, to front up to whatever cross your carrying, do we not? if we truly believe in the cross to ‘carry it’. I keep stopping at that point. Saying to myself, ‘this is your chance, this will, this can, be your highway to heaven and to be so bold… sanctity, which ‘must be the goal’.
So how? How? can I yield to what I want? When all I really want is heaven? My own salvation, my wife’s and my children’s.   I’m really struggling with that question. Do I have a right, an obligation to myself, to the church to my…. Wife and children to seek an annulment. I’m confused yet screaming inside to escape and start again.
Sometimes I really think this struggle is nothing less than a consumerist-ic mentality that I am submitting to like everyone else? Is that not really what’s going on within those seeking an annulment. “I want happiness on this earth? I have a right to it? And I want it? I mean isn’t that what the church originally with great courage and conviction said to its people “no you do not have that right” but it is prayed and hoped for, for all. (Our Lady saying; “I cannot promise you happiness in this life but only the next) Keeping in mind in the Eastern Rite (our lost sister) they put a crown on both in the sacrament of marriage, resembling ‘White martyrdom’ dying to yourself every day. I struggle with that! Is that not what is going on in my own struggle … that!
I don’t know if I can do this. The heart is willing but the flesh is so weak.

Answer
Marriage is poorly understood by most Catholics, unfortunately, including priests.  Marriage is a sacrament.  It is meant to help both individuals get to heaven.  Given that it is a sacrament, it must be voluntarily embraced by the husband and the wife, without coercion.  Interestingly, that complete surrender might happen after the actual wedding; in fact it probably does in most marriages, because what draws us together is not what keeps us together.  If circumstances make you suspect that you are not in a life-giving sanctifying marriage, (but yet you feel called to marry) then you owe it to God as well as yourself, and any potential future spouse, and even in fact to your current spouse, to truly explore whether there is a valid marriage.  It is true that many people have probably saved their souls by putting up with a painful, abusive, or otherwise terrible marriage.  More power to them.  But God desires us to be happy, not miserable, and while there are no guarantees, as Our Lady said, the pursuit of happiness is a God-given instinct that leads us to do the right thing, assuming we also have formed our conscience.  Whether you are in a happy marriage or not, every Christian is called to die to himself every day.  If you make an honest attempt to investigate the validity of your marriage and are told by the Church that it was valid, then you can pursue learning to live with this cross.  By the way, our Orthodox brothers and sisters can divorce and remarry.  Hope this helps.