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Posted on 07/02/2004 11:15:54 AM PDT by cnkie
John Kerry is a man full of contradiction.
In 1995, already divorced from his first wife Julia Thorne, John Kerry pressed for an annulment.
He didn't bother to tell Ms. Thorne. The church simply informed her by way of a letter that this was the case.
Ms. Thorne had been severely depressed and near suicide when Kerry walked out on her, and in pressing for an annulment he cast his daughters into the bizarre state of illigimacy. (one of them was still a teenager at the time)
Compare that with the Jack Ryan Illinois Senate case where both parents were arguing to keep the records sealed so that their 9 year old son could be spared the embarassment of unsubstantiated allegiations.
(Excerpt) Read more at crosswalk.com ...
Exactly.
Additionally, the fee is not hard and fast, and those unable to pay can basically pay what they can afford.
There are cases where the annulment has been expensive and lengthy but I believe that occurs under unusual circumstances, and involves not just the annulment but future marriage.
A few Catholic millionaires who, despite having Church marriages, have received annulments and then remarried, over the years:
Frank Sinatra, Lee Radziwill, several Kennedys, Clare Booth Luce, etc.
In my case, the fee was waived.
4 Who else besides the couple seeking a declaration of nullity will be questioned during the annulment process?
The ex-spouse or respondent will need to be contacted, but not necessarily by the spouse or petitioner seeking the annulment. The diocesan tribunal office will make that written contact with the ex-spouse, with the name and address provided by the petitioner.
The respondent’s cooperation is welcome, but not essential. Simple justice, however, requires that an ex-spouse at least be made aware that the petitioner is seeking an annulment and that the respondent may be part of the procedure. It is only fair that both persons have an opportunity to present their sides of the marriage.
...
5 Does an annulment make the children illegitimate?
No. The parents, now divorced, presumably once obtained a civil license and entered upon a legal marriage. Children from that union are, therefore, their legitimate offspring. Legitimate means “legal.” The civil divorce and the Church annulment do not alter this situation. Nor do they change the parents’ responsibility toward the children. In fact, during annulment procedures the Church reminds petitioners of their moral obligation to provide for the proper upbringing of their children.
Nevertheless, persons pondering the Catholic annulment process do often express this concern about the legitimacy of the children after that procedure. It’s a persistent rumor.
Had to google it: Ten Questions About Annulment
I think you're wrong. And it does not become us. I'm all for fighting down and dirty, but we have enough politically that we don't have to go and drag his first wife through it again.
Don't you see the difference? When we point out their moral failures WE look petty and even sleazey. When the left points out our failures WE look like hypocrites. The more crap that came out about the Clinton's the higher their approval numbers wnet because it looked like the sanctimonious VRWC was out to get them.
Rubbing Kerry's nose in the mess of his divorce is going to backfire on us and make him a sympathetic figure.
Are you two kidding? Yours is the attitude that prevented those "compassionate" GOP Senators from going after Bubba Clinton during the Impeachment proceedings.
When you can go for the throat, then do so. Take the gloves off...
ANYTHING that demonstrates Kerry's true character -- a deserter -- CAN'T POSSIBLY help him.
I agree..... Let it all hang out for Kerry. Same as it did for Newt and Bob Livingston. Kerry lead a life of wine woman and song in DC before Teresa. He did jack as a Senator.
The 'letter from the church' had no bearing on his walking out on his mentally ill spouse and teenage daughters. You have to have a divorce before you can get an annulment. He'd already left them.
And McCollough is WRONG! An annulment doesn't make children illegitimate. Legistimacy is conferred on children by right of the parent's marriage license, granted by the State in which they reside. If the dissolution of that marriage contract doesn't make the kids illegitimate, the annulment of the Sacrament won't do it either.
The American Catholic Politicians:
Legates of the New Church
Michael J. Matt
Editor, The Remnant
In her book, Shattered Faith: A Woman’s Struggle to Stop the Catholic Church from Annulling Her Marriage, Sheila Rauch Kennedy, an Episcopalian, delivered an indictment against the post-conciliar Church back in 1998 that should have caused Catholics from here to the Vatican to cringe with embarrassment. Mrs. Kennedy, readers will recall, was refusing to roll over and accept the Archdiocese of Boston’s absurd ruling that her 12-year marriage to Congressman Joseph Kennedy, the son of slain US Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was never sacramentally valid.
Though the couple had divorced after twelve years of marriage it wasn’t until Congressman Kennedy wanted to marry again that the Archdiocese had to consider yet another set of “special circumstances” for the Kennedy clan. Political expedience necessitated that the Congressman seek the cloak of legitimacy from the Church in order to help circumvent any potential roadblocks on his way to the governor’s mansion in Massachusetts that year. (Due to subsequent personal tragedy—the accidental death of Michael Kennedy in 1997—his gubernatorial bid was eventually abandoned.)
True to form, however, the Archdiocese granted the controversial annulment, much to the dismay of Mrs. Kennedy. Ironically enough, her battle against the Archdiocese’ decision—which she has since taken all the way to Rome—was as much an inadvertent defense of the Church’s pre-conciliar moral governance as it was a defense of the legitimacy of the two children which the Kennedy marriage had produced. Mrs. Kennedy was outraged by the two-faced politicking of the Church. Showing more integrity than the Archdiocese of Boston, in fact, she clarified a very simple concept which the new Church still seems incapable of grasping:
My concern was for my children’s moral development, a responsibility I felt the Church had shared with parents in the larger community for nearly two thousand years. To me, were the Church to declare my children the offspring of a marriage that had never existed, it would be abdicating its sacred and historic role to protect and promote their moral well-being.1
So, on the one hand, we now know that the Archdiocese of Boston was for decades covering up rampant sexual abuse of young men by Catholic priests, and, on the other hand, the same archdiocese had a policy which, in effect, made bastards of thousands of other Catholic children by unjustly annulling marriages willy-nilly.
Mrs. Kennedy believes in divorce, by the way. What she was decrying in her book is the hypocrisy of the post-conciliar Church, the same hypocrisy which nauseates not just traditional Catholics but a lot of outside observers as well, including a host of disillusioned wives who are the victims of “Catholic divorce”, euphemistically referred to these days as the “annulment process”—yet another spawn of Vatican II. (Ken Jones points out in his masterful Index of Leading Catholic Indicators that there were virtually no annulments in the United States in 1968. Thirty years later there were 50,498.)
The number of annulments continues to skyrocket and yet the new Church refuses to call it what it is—DIVORCE! Several heartbreaking testimonies of Catholic women victimized by the new Church’s cruel marriage annulment policy appeared in Mrs. Kennedy’s book:
All of the women I spoke with were married for more than twenty years and each is the mother of at least three children. Most were raised as traditional Catholics. The others were dedicated converts who joined the Church to share their husbands’ faith. Largely because of their strong beliefs in the Church’s teachings, they had forgone careers and defined themselves as wives and mothers. When the Church declared that the unions to which they had dedicated their lives had never existed, their faith in the institution and in themselves was shattered.2
Who could blame them? And who’s going to answer for this colossal scandal? Our progressive churchmen may call it the “annulment process” but Mrs. Kennedy, who was married in the Catholic Church, calls it “lying before God.” And, you know what? The Episcopalian is absolutely right! That’s precisely what it is:
Those seeking annulments are not encouraged to accept responsibility for their failed marriages. Rather, the Church searches for a technicality in its laws that will render the marriage invalid. The person seeking an annulment is vindicated of responsibility for the breakup of the union on the grounds that there never was a true marriage in the first place...they [the children of annulled marriages] have become the offspring of unions that never existed. For some persons, annulments require an even greater compromise in personal truth: lying before God. 3
Indeed. So even Episcopalians are recognizing the modern Church’s sellout on the indissolubility of marriage as nothing more than a cheap sham conducted by milquetoast churchmen who lack the courage to call it what it is. Even before the priest/sex scandals had hit high gear in Boston, Mrs. Kennedy was rightly pointing out that the moral authority of the Church has been squandered:
I realized that much of what they [Catholic women victimized by forced annulments] were saying was not about how things used to be but about their fears for the future. Many saw their church, the entity they had once trusted above all others, as one more institution that had abandoned traditional values for short-term gain and social convenience. They saw a future in which their children would be unable to rely on the Church either as a moral beacon within their communities or as a source of comfort in a family crisis. And they felt that without moral principle or truth, there would be no trust, and that without trust, a community and a family would break down. 4
Shattered Faith makes it abundantly obvious that it’s the post-conciliar Church’s inability to be honest either with itself or the world which is so offensive to non-Catholics. What the world calls “divorce”, the Church of Vatican II calls the “annulment process”; what the world calls “birth control”, the Church of Vatican II calls “natural family planning” (mandatory classes); what the world calls “religious indifferentism”, the Church of Vatican II calls “ecumenism”; the world shouts: “Who are you to force your beliefs on me?”, while the Church whimpers: “We no longer believe in conversion since the faith systems of our separated brethren subsist in the Church of Christ anyway.”
At nearly every level the post-conciliar Church has signed a treaty of surrender to the world, her only condition being that she retains the right to change the nomenclature as she sees fit. More than anything, the Spirit of Vatican II is so abominably lukewarm! It is neither hot nor cold but shivers along in tepid mediocrity, earning for the Church the disgust of those within and outside her walls.
In 1998, an utterly scandalized Mrs. Kennedy wrote that Boston’s marriage tribunal granted the annulment on the grounds that her husband lacked “due discretion.” “In other words,” she mockingly observes, “at the time of our marriage, Joe had suffered from a lack of due discretion of such magnitude that he was incapable of marriage and therefore our union had never been valid.”
Apparently, Joe found that “adequate discretion” a little later on when, even before his annulment proceedings had been completed, he went ahead and married a cute, little member of his staff.
As for the Archdiocese, well, sadly, who would expect anything more from that fun house? Things only got worse after that, you’ll recall. After Cardinal Law had finally been offered his attractive “redundancy package” for his part in covering up the largest, sickest priest scandal in history, a new sheriff came to town. With his plastic six-guns a’blazin’, Archbishop Sean O’Malley issued a statement about pro-choice, “Catholic” politicians receiving Communion that pretty much says it all. Get a load of this timber-shivering proclamation:
"A Catholic politician who holds a public, pro-choice position should not be receiving Communion. However, the Church presumes each person is receiving in good faith. It is not our policy to deny Communion. It is up to the individual."
Whew! That’ll show ‘em. By the way, pro-aborts John Kerry and Ted Kennedy attended O’Malley’s installation ceremony with bells on last fall. Wouldn’t you know it—the two notoriously pro-death senators trotted up the aisle and received Holy Communion right on cue.
No that gaze...well it could be boredom -you reap what you sow.
He doesn't know anything about the Catechism of the Catholic Church or Canon law either. McCullough has hit the stupidity trifecta.
Right. Whatever it takes to win. This is war. The liberals certainly get it and even make up lies and propaganda to try and win. I'm not suggesting we resort to propaganda. All I'm saying is we should use whatever facts we have and not hold back trying to play goody-goody with these scumbags.
An annulment doesn't mean that the MARRIAGE never took place, it simply means that the Sacrament that was entered into by the couple was not valid, for any number of reasons. The Church teaches that for the Sacrament to be valid, the couple must enter into the marriage freely and without duress (pregnancy is a duress factor), the couple must be willing to accept children into their union and raise them in the Church, and the couple must intend to remain faithful to each other. That last one probably affected the ease with which the Kennedy men were able to get annulments; they learned well from Old Papa Joe that being faithful to your spouse is not something that they need to bother with.
It was Joe Kennedy who got the annulment from his 'Mainline Philadelphia' wife who was not Catholic, and many people believed her book which stated that Joe made their kids illegitimate by asking for an annulment. It's the same tactic that was used by my oldest brother's first wife when he applied for an annulment after she'd left him and sent him divorce papers. She tried to turn the kids against him, and it worked for a while, until they grew up and realized what a nut case she truly was. I believe Joe Kennedy's ex-wife was also trying to turn her kids and anyone else who would listen to her or read her book, against him. I never liked him anyway, so it didn't affect me, but obviously folks are STILL confused about the matter, thus articles like this!
Well, given that the premise of this piece is false (children of a religious annullment are NOT illegitimate, but are legitimate and continue to be), this could backfire big time on those who continue to spread this lie, and would help, not hinder Kerry--not to mention the anti-Catholic bias of this BS.
So have some POOR Catholic people. Marriage tribunals have the option to waive the administration fee, if the couple cannot afford it.
He does know a hypocritical, A-hole when he sees it. That's quite enough for me...
Interestingly enough, not "knowing anything" about the CC's maze of protocols is something most Catholics themselves are clueless and indifferent about.
He does know a hypocritical, A-hole when he sees it. That's quite enough for me...
Interestingly enough, not "knowing anything" about the CC's maze of protocols is something most Catholics themselves are clueless and indifferent about.
Thanks. If he was able to get a marriage annulled after having had grown children, then that's a scam involving the illustrating a phoney annulment for political purposes. If he didn't get the annulment then his present marriage affects his standing in the church. Seems either way, it doesn't look good for him.
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