Free Republic

Posts Posted on June 9, 2020 What is an Annulment and How Does it Differ From Divorce? There are some today who speak of annulment as “just another name for a Catholic divorce.” However, this is not correct. An annulment (more technically described as a “Declaration of Nullity”) is a recognition by the Church, based on evidence, that what may in fact have seemed to be a marriage, was not due to some intrinsic flaw at the time the vows we exchanged. A marriage may have been a civil marriage entered into in good faith by one or both...

Marriage was instituted by God with Adam and Eve, one man, one woman and was given to all races. After the fall of man, marriage got all screwed up, and the devil has been at war on marriage and families ever since. When Jesus came he did something new for those who believed in him. He made marriage a sacrament. If non-Christians get married it is a "natural marriage." It is valid but it is not a sacrament. When Christians get married properly, there is a special kind of power from the Holy Spirit that lands on them and permanently...

Bulent Tezcan, deputy chairman of the Republican People's Party (CHP). Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP  has called for the annulment of the results of Sunday’s referendum.CHP deputy chairman Bulent Tezcan slammed the decision by the High Electoral Board (YSK) to accept unstamped ballots as valid saying, “Everyone knows that the ‘no’ side won. After pressure and threats couldn’t produce the desired results, the YSK took action. This election is an election without stamps and has no legitimacy,” he said referring to the the last-minute decision by the YSK to use the unsealed ballots.“Packages were stolen, externally manufactured votes were used....

The Archdiocese of New Orleans will offer a writing workshop for persons seeking an annulment in the Catholic Church or for persons responding to an annulment. The workshop will be held in St. Rita Parish’s Msgr. Champagne Complex, 7100 Jefferson Hwy in Harahan. The series will be for five (5) Tuesdays, March 7, 14, 21, 28 and April 4, 2017. Hours are 7:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. The materials for the series cost $25.00. To register or for more information, call Cathy, 504-861-6243.

Sentence Issued in Canon Law Legal Case - Catholics appear hypocritical when the Church teaches about the indissolubility of marriage, but remains silent when professed Catholic spouses abandon marriage… Mary’s Advocates has been given access by an abandoned husband to a formal decree issued by his Catholic diocese which defended the husband’s marriage against marital abandonment.

Austria's highest court has annulled the result of the presidential election narrowly lost by the far-right candidate of the Freedom Party. The party had challenged the result, saying that postal votes had been improperly handled. The Freedom Party candidate, Norbert Hofer, lost the election to the former leader of the Greens, Alexander Van der Bellen, by less than a percentage point. The election will now be re-run. Announcing the decision, Gerhard Holzinger, head of the Constitutional Court, said: "The challenge brought by Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache against the 22 May election... has been upheld.

The Catholic world was set abuzz a few days ago when, at the opening of the Pastoral Congress of the Diocese of Rome, the local ordinary called into question the validity of most sacramental marriages. As reported by the Bergoglian News Agency (otherwise, CNA): Pope Francis said Thursday that the great majority of sacramental marriages today are not valid, because couples do not enter into them with a proper understanding of permanence and commitment. ‘We live in a culture of the provisional,’ the Pope said in impromptu remarks June 16. After addressing the Diocese of Rome’s pastoral congress, he held...

Drew Mariani - Relevant Radio, Thursday 5 pm Eastern I'm scheduled for interview live with Drew Mariani at 5 pm Eastern tomorrow, Thursday, April 21. We'll be talking about Mary's Advocates efforts to ask the Church to work to prevent divorce from happening in the first place. The Catechism and the Code of Canon Law are my primary resources. Pope Francis' exhortation on the family, Amortia Leatitia, helps too. If you have a question or can share your own experience (good or bad) about the Church helping to keep a marriage together, give us a call (1-877-766-3777). See list of...

The pope, too, has a pen and a phone. Has Francis’ motu proprio trumped the Synod? Or handicapped conservatives? Hard to say. But one thing now is certain: Marriage is indissoluble except when it is not. Put another way, indissolubility is revealed to be more soluble than we had previously understood... ...Analyses of this latest twist of the mercy spanner have been piling up. Papal apologists offer their expected apologias; critics beg to differ. Among those with differences are some very serious, informed voices. Some insist nothing has changed; neater and kinder is all. Others discern a material shift: The...

The finalized, complete list of participants in the Synod of Bishops in 2015 was published in today's Vatican Bollettino: XIV General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops (October 4 to 25 2015) - List of Participants, 15/09/2015. In addition to the Synod officers (who are all hold-overs from last year's "Extraordinary Synod"), delegates elected by the Bishops' Conferences and the Union of Superior Generals and confirmed by the Pope as Synod members months ago, and ex officio participants (the heads of the Eastern Catholic Churches and the Prefects or Presidents of Curial dicasteries), the final list contains the names of...

Quo usque tandem.... I know, I know… I am borrowing heavily from Cicero here. But it seems to me that the Vatican Catilina is not going to enjoy the rest of his disgraceful pontificate, which we hope will be short anyway. The rather explosive news is now everywhere: a seven-page document gravely accusing Francis of incompetence and tampering with doctrine is being circulated within the Vatican, and has been very fittingly leaked to the press. We do not have the translation, but there can be no doubt that the content is brutal. From what I can see the grievances concern...

"Socci: With Papally-Mandated "Catholic Divorce" destroying a Sacrament, Schism Looms Large on the Catholic Horizon" "Newsweek" recently had a photo of Pope Francis on their front-cover with the headline: “Is the Pope Catholic?”. Subtitle: “Of course he is. You just wouldn’t know it from his press clips.” Indeed, it is a legitimate question, seeing that the Argentine Pope has prayed in a Mosque and said in an interview to Scalfari: “There is no Catholic God.” The anxiety in the Church is now becoming enormous after the 8th of September. In fact with two Motu Proprios on the nullity of marriage,...

Dioceses across the US have been bombarded with questions about the annulment news from the Rome. The Diocese of Madison, Wis. has already released a timely document (Frequently Asked Questions Re: Mitis Iudex Dominus Iesus) that should prove helpful to Catholics seeking an annulment and Church leaders concerned about setting realistic expectations... Who qualifies for the shorter process? Answer: The shorter process is designed only for those rare cases when it can be employed without injustice. Three strict qualifications have to be met. Both spouses have to petition for it together, or if not, then the other party must at...

If Pope Francis’ Mitis Iudex becomes law it will require, among other things, that arch/bishops personally assess, and in some cases adjudicate, certain kinds of marriage nullity petitions. Now obviously some, perhaps many, prelates will feel (based on their lack of advanced canonical training, and/or their personal indisposition toward juridic work, and/or their concerns for negative implications to their wider pastoral work that having to choose between types of petitions and individual parties in annulment cases will inevitably provoke) inadequate to this task. Already I am hearing, however, that arch/bishops looking to avoid their looming judicial and procedural responsibilities under...

Rorate Caeli just translated an article that appeared in L'Ossevatore Romano on September 8. It was written by Msgr. Pio Vito Pinto, the head of the Commission for the reform of the canonical process--in other words the point man for the recently announced annulment reforms. What he writes is stunning. And chilling. The three main points are these: +The annulment reforms are not merely procedural reforms to introduce more fairness and efficiency in the process, but a full-scale revolution in thought and practice towards the marriage validity question, designed to radically increase the number of annulments. +It is Christ, acting...

T o much fanfare in the press, Pope Francis has started a "dialogue" about the Catholic Church's marriage practices. The part that has received the most attention is whether civilly divorced and civilly remarried Catholics should be admitted to Holy Communion, without having to abandon their second marriage, which the church recognizes as continuing adultery. This issue will be addressed by the bishops of the Catholic Church at a "Synod on the Family" over this year and next. Unfortunately, the pope's favorite theologian and the pope himself have initiated this discussion in a befogging cloud of pessimism. The pope is...

ROME, September 8, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) -- The public confusion over whether the Vatican’s upcoming Ordinary Synod on the Family will somehow endorse divorce has been cleared up by Pope Francis, as he said definitively today that marriage is “indissoluble,” meaning that it is permanent until death. In his decrees released today on annulments -- declarations that a marriage was invalid from the beginning – the Holy Father moved to make it easier and faster to determine nullity of a marriage and eliminated the cost for such deliberations. But in doing so he also reaffirmed that as far as God and...

Please excuse the provocative title, and do not misunderstand. Obviously, neither the Pope nor anyone else can change Church doctrine normatively. That is, Church doctrine remains true and unchangeable whatever people--without or within the Church--believe or say. In the same way the teachings of Christ or the Commandments themselves remain true and unchanging. What the Pope can do, however, is to say that Church doctrine has changed or, more to the point, imply by his words or actions that it has. Or he can say or imply that Church doctrine wasn't what most people--including most people in the Church itself...

With the completion of the Synod on the Family coming next month, Pope Francis has moved to take one item more or less off the table. In the Extraordinary Synod that kicked off the yearlong debate within the Catholic Church on outreach to broken families, a conflict arose around proposals to allow divorced and remarried Catholics to remain in communion regardless of whether they received dispensation to remarry through an annulment. The pontiff issued two changes to the annulment process that may have short-circuited those efforts from the bishops in Germany: ABC Breaking News | Latest News Videos Francis’...