Daily Reflection

ANNULMENT
FIRST WORD
The Catholic Church presumes that every legitimate Marriage is valid and binding for life unless proven otherwise. This presumption is based on certain prerequisites that are expected to have been fulfilled to make any marriage valid and binding. Summarily, the prerequisites include that the marital act or consent must involve an adequate ability to reason, critical deliberation and freedom from any kind of force and ability to assume and fulfill the essential elements of married life. But should any marriage fall short of this presumption of the Church it is seen by the Church as “no-marriage.” Hence, the case or issue of annulment and not divorce comes up the stage. It is this issue of annulment that this work casts its gaze upon.
ANNULMENT: A DESCRIPTION
The canon law defines marriage in its essence the meaning of marriage as “a consortium of the whole of life, in other words, as a partnership of the whole of life” (Canon/ 83, 1055 § 1). So marriage has no room for annulment or divorce.
Annulment comes in when the ecclesiastical tribunal process discovers and proves that a specific failed marriage lacked something essential ab initio (from the beginning), and therefore is invalid  and not binding for life, thus deserving an annulment more aptly called declaration of nullity. The presence of an undispensed impediment before the wedding gives rise to the nullification of impediment and this is nothing but the dissolution of a marriage. The issue of putting asunder what God has joined together does not arise because what was viewed as marriage in reality never occurred. In fact, it is taken as putative marriage. In law, when a thing is declared null and void, it means that such thing has no existence, it did not take place and so is of no effect and consequence. So, annulment is far apart from divorce as it does not hamper a marriage that once validly existed, rather it maintains that ab initio, something very essential to marriage was lacking in the relationship.
In “is and was” a declaration of nullity or annulment is a statement of fact by the Catholic Church that a particular marriage from the beginning was never a marriage in the true and real sense of the word according to the teaching of the Catholic Church on marriage.

WHO NULLIFIES A MARRIAGE?According to canon 1671, the nullification of any marriage is the duty of the ecclesiastical judge. It is therefore, only through the decree of the competent judge can nullification of marriage be validly given or pronounced. Having subjected the marriage in question to an unbiased scrutiny to fish out possible impediments that invalidates a marriage and found out proven ground for impediment, the judge, in conscience, on moral certitude and on the invocation of the name of God declares a marriage null and void.

CONCLUSIONThe study above proves that annulment is a possibility in the Church. It is quite different from divorce and does not in any way go contrary to the divine law. It dissolves a marriage that was ab initio invalidated by impediment, lack of consent and lack of canonical form. Conclusively, the Church nullifies a putative marriage regardless of number of years of its existence or number of children begotten.