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I left the Catholic church years ago; i can assure you the divorce question was not even on the radar. I wasn't even married at the time. My husband is also former catholic. We both attend a very conservative Reformed Church, go to bible studies, active in the local Christian community, etc. Never been divorced and never will. My sibling, and many of my cousins who stayed Catholic.. all went to Catholic schools by the way.. are divorced and remarried or living together. Those of us that left have stayed in our long term marriages. Yes, there is plenty of sin to go around in all denominations, but by far i have found the conservative, Bible-believing Protestant churches to be more active and disciplined in their christian faith. And i would be happy to introduce you to many former Catholics who attend the same church as I who did not leave because of divorce. Besides.. how does a Catholic who was married for a number of years to another Catholic obtain an annulment and stay in the “church” with their present spouse? Just asking.

An annulment is a ruling by the Catholic Church that a marriage was never valid TO BEGIN WITH; it has to be rooted in a situation that existed at the time of the wedding. In the former NJ governor’s case, if he was married in the Catholic Church his wife could obtain an annulment by the fact that he was a homosexual AT THE TIME OF THE WEDDING. One of the reasons the Catholic Church stopped pushing young people to “do the right thing” if the woman was pregnant out of wedlock because that was always grounds for an annulment; either party could later claim they married only because she was pregnant at the time of the wedding.

Another example would be someone who was mentally ill at the time of the wedding, or someone who was already married to someone else at the time of the wedding.

People refer to annulment as “Catholic divorce”, but the timing issue is what really distinguishes it from a divorce. A divorce is a legal ruling that a valid marriage is over; an annulment is a decree that a marriage never took place. I believe Ted Kennedy’s wife publicly fought the annulment he sought; she knew there were no valid grounds for it.