Question Corner: Why won’t the church grant me an annulment after my husband had an affair?

Q: My husband and I got a divorce because my husband had an affair. Why doesn’t the church agree with me that it was his fault and grant my annulment? Why is my church siding with him? (New York)

A: I’m sorry you went through such a painful experience. But with respect to your specific question, I think you may be misunderstanding the basic principles of the church’s marriage nullity process.

First of all, the goal of the church’s nullity process is to determine whether there was some problem or issue at the time of the wedding that was serious enough and of such a nature so as to prevent a true marriage from ever being contracted in the first place.

This is in line with Jesus’ teachings in the Gospel of Matthew on the absolute permanence of marriage, “unless the marriage is unlawful” (Mt 19:9). The church seeks to discern whether there was some invalidating “unlawful” element present.

Some of these potential causes of marital nullity are truly nobody’s fault. For example, severe psychological disturbances or mental illness can leave a person incapable of the free consent needed to enter a binding marital union. But such issues are medical concerns, and almost by definition are not the result of any deliberate ill will on the part of the afflicted spouse.

There are other grounds for nullity that are due to one or both parties’ bad intentions. As one example, Canon 1098 of the Code of Canon Law tells us that: “A person contracts invalidly who enters marriage inveigled by deceit, perpetrated in order to secure consent, concerning some quality of the other party, which of its very nature can seriously disrupt the partnership of conjugal life.”

Obviously, this level of fraud is a serious sin on the part of the deceiving spouse. No one would doubt that someone who committed this sin is morally in the wrong and should make a good confession.

Yet perhaps counterintuitively, this moral dimension is not an area that the church’s nullity process is meant to address — even while condemning sin in general and admonishing the specific sins that lead to a failed or invalid marriage are part of the church’s overall pastoral mission in the big picture. Judges in marriage tribunals are not there to judge the souls of the parties in nullity cases, nor are they interested in assigning personal blame to either party. Rather, a marriage tribunal is only concerned with determining whether an alleged ground for nullity can be proven in a particular case.

Another counterintuitive piece of information about the marriage nullity process is that adultery in and of itself is not a ground for nullity. There is one ground called “partial simulation against the good of fidelity” (see Canon 1101, 2) where one party essentially never intended to be faithful and entered the union with the thought that they would always keep the door open to extramarital affairs.

But committing adultery because this was something that was always envisioned as a possibility ever since the time of the wedding is different from a scenario where a person intended to be faithful when they said “I do,” but then later succumbed to temptation many years into the marriage.

Since I don’t know the details, I can’t comment on your particular case. But assuming that you petitioned for a declaration of nullity on the ground of “partial simulation against the good of fidelity,” and further assuming you received a negative decision from the tribunal where a declaration of nullity was not granted, my best guess is that the tribunal could not find sufficient proof that your husband always reserved to himself the right to have adulterous relationships from the very beginning.

But while I’m sure this decision is disappointing for you, it does not mean that the church is siding with your husband, and even less that the church approves of his behavior.

Jenna Marie Cooper, who holds a licentiate in canon law, is a consecrated virgin and a canonist whose column appears weekly at OSV News. Send your questions to CatholicQA@osv.com.

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