Legal fiction?
If you enter into a contract with a person who intended to deceive you, is that contract still valid? The proper minister of the sacrament of marriage are the man and woman themselves. If one of the spouses entered into it fraudulently or ignorantly, no valid sacrament was effected despite all the externals, kinda like if you go into the confessional and lie to the priest.
The principle behind annulment is sound. Now if you are going to complain that bishops watered down those principles to get Catholic divorce through the back door, that’s a different story.
Exactly.