Reasons for the Invalidity of a Marriage
by Sheryl Tamaat
 
Historically the Church has recognized a sizable array of conditions that invalidate marriage, yet the number of marriages declared null in the world remained in the hundreds until the 1970s.  Actually the number of grounds for annulment has not really changed.  A series of impediments, making a person incapable of validly contracting marriage, have long been applied to unions, for example:
 
(1) the male is not yet sixteen and/or the female is not yet fourteen at the time of the wedding;
 
(2) the male is impotent, the female is frigid, or the marriage is never consummated;
 
(3) either party is still involved in a marriage which is not properly dissolved;
 
(4) a Catholic and an unbaptized person marry without a proper dispensation;
 
(5) the male is a recipient of Holy Orders and is not personally dispensed by the pope;
 
(6) either party who publicly vowed celibacy did not receive a dispensation to marry;
 
(7) the female is forced to marry by means of abduction or confinement;
 
(8) one party kills the other in order to enter a new marriage;
 
(9) the parties are closely related by blood;
 
(10) there is prior affinity between the parties such as a widowed person marrying the deceased spouse’s parent or child;
 
(11) someone party to a common-law marriage later attempts marriage with the parent or child of the live-in partner;
 
(12) a person marries a child or sibling he or she has adopted;
 
(13) Catholics enter a marriage “lacking form” and, therefore, validity because it does not take place before an authorized priest and witnesses.
 
Decrees of nullity also continue to be granted to those who qualify under the terms of the Pauline and Petrine privileges.  (Vasoli, p. 23)
 
However, the overwhelming majority of ordinary process decrees of nullity granted in the last two decades in the United States are based on a faulty interpretation of defective consent.
 
Consent becomes defective in four general ways: When there is (1) ignorance of the essential properties of marriage (permanence, fidelity, openness to children); (2) willful refusal to accept one or more of those properties; (3) a serious psychological disorder causing one or both parties to be incapable of free and informed consent; and (4) some external agent or condition that makes free and informed consent impossible, even though neither party is psychologically incapable of it (Vasoli, p. 70).
 
Number three, a serious psychological disorder, has become whatever most American tribunals define it to be in order to declare marriages null.  On the contrary, Cardinal Egan writes that a person who truly lacks due discretion for marriage would also lack due discretion for something as serious as marriage.  One thinks of signing a contract to purchase a car or a house.  Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Egan have declared in unmistakable terms that only severe mental disorders render people incapable of valid consent to marriage (Vasoli, p. 78).  
 
 Incapacity  or incompetence is also used for decrees of nullity in the U.S.  “Incapacity for assuming the essential obligations of marriage is a genus of which there are two species: (1) impotence, the incapacity for the procreational obligations of marriage, and (2) incompetence, the incapacity for the personalist obligations of marriage” The Invalid Marriage, p. 48, Fr. Lawrence G. Wrenn, 1998).  Fr. Wrenn’s definition is incorrect according to Cardinal Edward Egan.           
 
According to Cardinal Egan, writing as a member of the Sacred Roman Rota, “Only two groups of psychic afflictions have thus far been established by canonical jurisprudence” by which a diocesan tribunal may declare a marriage invalid for reason of incapacity.  They are (1) satyriasis in males and nymphomania in females, which render a party incapable of fidelity, and (2) sexual dysfunctions or aberrations, because of which the afflicted is after marriage irremediably incapable of the conjugal act.  Cardinal Egan, The Nullity of Marriage for Reason of Incapacity to Fulfill the Essential Obligations of Marriage,” p 14.
 
Failure to form a communion of life is not a ground for nullity.  “No diocesan tribunal is empowered to declare a marriage invalid by appealing to a jurisprudence according to which valid marriage consent requires the exchange of a right to a successful, conjugal, interpersonal relationship, no matter in what terms that right might be described,” Cardinal Egan, The Nullity of Marriage for Reason of Incapacity to Fulfill the Essential Obligations of Marriage,” p. 13.  (Http://www.marysadvocates.org/eganincapacity.html)
 
If the grounds for nullity as taught by the Church were used rather than abused by American tribunals, the number of marriages declared null would go down dramatically.
 
It is almost forgotten that since time immemorial the Church’s first concern when spouses don’t get along and live apart is the teaching about reconciliation which St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians.