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Hi Dee,
I'll do what I can to answer your question but there is one thing not clear to me in your question. When you say you are a “Confirmed Episcopalian” and then add “(my parent's choice)” it makes me wonder what you were baptized as.
- Were you baptized Episcopalian or were you baptized Roman Catholic and then your parents brought you to the Episcopal Church to be confirmed?
In the first and more probable scenario, you are an Episcopalian and in the second you are already a Roman Catholic since you did not leave by your own choice.
Now assuming you were baptized an Episcopalian, here is my summary of what you stated:
Your first and only marriage is to a divorced Roman Catholic who was married previously in the Catholic Church. Your husband's first marriage was due to the misperception that he had to marry a woman who was pregnant with his child.
Now you desire to enter the Roman Catholic Church but you are being prevented from doing so due to your husband's past marriage. Finally, you feel you are being punished and turned away.
I can understand how you feel; hopefully your RCIA program will explain things better so that you don't feel it is all about you. What it is all about is Marriage. The Roman Catholic Church believes that Marriage is a Natural Institution from God and that Jesus raised Marriage to the dignity of a Sacrament. Assuming your husband's first wife was baptized, the two of them stood before the Church and chose each other in marriage making solemn promises binding them for life. Your husband is bound to those promises unless he can prove to the Church through the declaration of nullity process that the promises were made invalidly. Judging by what you have shared, this may not be so hard to do seeing that he felt “forced” to marry her.
Because your husband is bound by those promises, he is not free to marry you in the Church, so your marriage, although strong and lasting is not valid in the eyes of the Church. If you entered the Catholic Church through RCIA you would instantly be, as your husband is now, unable to receive Holy Communion or the other Sacraments as you would be instantly considered a “Catholic who is married outside of the Church”. In order to prevent this obvious awkwardness the Church asks that this situation be remedied prior to your entering the faith.
Your husband now has two good reasons to enter into the nullity process:
- his own access to the Sacraments, and
- his wife's desire to enter into the Catholic Church.
This should be enough motivation for him to begin the process — if for no other reason than for his love for you.
Often people hesitate to do this because:
- they are afraid to open old wounds or
- they feel that they don't want to deal with their former spouses again, or
- they just can't deal with it
but he should at least agree to discuss it with a priest or someone certified to do this work for the Tribunal. He will find that it is not impossible, that he can do this, and that it is just as much for his own good, as it is for yours.
Fr. Jonathan
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