Is Annulment Necessary?
Answered by Father Kenneth Doyle –
Question: I was married by a minister/attorney 40 years ago. My husband was Jewish, and the marriage ended in a divorce after nine months. I now want to marry a man who is a widower. We are both active Catholics, and we want to be married in the church. Will I need to apply for an annulment? If so, how long will it take?
Answer: This is an easy one – both for me to answer and for you to carry out. I am assuming here that 40 years ago you never received the Catholic Church’s permission to marry in an other-than-Catholic ceremony. If that is true, you do not need now a full-scale annulment process which normally can take upward of a year. [ Or perhaps now a shorter time thanks to Pope Francis’ reforms of the annulment process].
Instead, you simply need an administrative proceeding – called, technically, a “declaration of nullity for absence of canonical form.” This would involve your meeting with a priest and filling out some short paperwork regarding your earlier wedding — where it took place, who officiated, etc.
The priest would then submit this petition to your diocese requesting a formal declaration that the earlier ceremony did not constitute a valid Catholic wedding – which would then leave you free now to marry in a Catholic ceremony. This would almost surely be a relatively quick process.
One California diocese, for example, says on its website that “a typical administrative declaration of nullity in the Diocese of Oakland would take about three weeks to obtain, once the necessary papers have been sent to the tribunal office.”
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