Hi, Robert —

If your wife is Catholic and did not get married in the Catholic Church, the marriage needs to be convalidated in the Catholic Church for her to receive any of the sacraments.

As it stands now, she is in an irregular marriage. Since you are not Catholic, she needs permission of the bishop to marry you and she must agree to:

• raise any children that may come in the marriage as Catholic and
• you must agree not to interfere.

Obviously, both of you have to agree to follow the Church's teaching on being open to life. In other words, both of you must agree not to use artificial contraception. If you had a previous marriage, that marriage must go through the annulment process before the Church will convalidate your current marriage. Until then, if there was a previous marriage and the other spouse is still living, you would technically be in a adulterous relationship. During the annulment process, she would have to agree not engage in marital relations.

If there is a previous marriage that can't be annulled, she must get out of the adulterous relationship. That's pretty much it.

Confession doesn't even come into play. She can't be absolved if she doesn't intend to rectify the situation. When she married outside the Church, she, in as much, committed an act of schism; meaning, she basically left the Church. That action must be corrected for her to be able to be absolved of other sins in Confession; the only exception being if she were in grave danger of death, in which case a priest could absolve her of any sins.

I would highly encourage her to come back home to the Church. The doors are always open to her and the doors are also open to you, should you want to become a Catholic.

If you wish to go deeper, consider buying a cheap copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to learn everything we believe as Catholics.

John