I have read many stories to my grandson, Willy Temaat, age eight. But none of them captured his mind, heart, and soul like Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Even filmmakers have gone overboard in making and remaking movies twenty times about the starving orphan boy who loses the only home he knew from birth simply by asking for a second helping of gruel. For his eighth birthday recently, Willy received some of the many Oliver Twist items available on the Internet like the hat and shirt in the photo:

Willy often repeats to me the words of ten-year-old Oliver to Mr. Bumble, the overseer of the Parish Workhouse where orphans grew up in the nineteenth century. The words: “Please, sir, can I have some more?” outraged Mr. Bumble to the point that he took Oliver by the hand and showed him the way out. Bumble locked the gate behind the child.

Willy is outraged that Mr. Bumble would be so mean. He asks me how children in those days could be treated as if they didn’t matter. I do not tell him that children these days are also treated as if they do not matter. Willy has a home with his family. He doesn’t know about the breakup of families.

Marriage, before Vatican II, was about having children and raising them for heaven.

What Marriage Was Before Vatican II

A man and woman give valid consent on their wedding day when they agree to take each other in marriage. This means that they agree to exchange the conjugal act exclusively, permanently, and be open to children.

Marriage, before Vatican II, was about having children and raising them for heaven.

The Annulment Scene Ignores the Welfare of Children

Marriages have not been judged according to traditional Catholic teaching of validity for 50 years. Impediments that made a marriage invalid were objective and included lack of proper age, impotency, prior vows, a Catholic and an unbaptized person marrying without a proper dispensation, force or abduction, one party kills the other in order to enter a new marriage, prior affinity, close relationship by blood, etc.

Canons 1095.2 and 1095.3 in The New Code of Canon Law and the definition of marriage in Lumen Gentium as a partnership of the whole of life have opened for tribunal judges, in their wild imaginations, causes of nullity that they can find in the testimonies of virtually any marriage.

I have in my files two examples of how lack of partnership resulted in an Affirmative decision. In October 2018, a marriage was declared invalid because the woman was judged unable to understand marriage as a partnership. She didn’t understand that she had the right to be treated as an equal partner in the union. “She chose marriage from a place of neediness, not from a place of freedom,” was the judgment.

This evidence came from the “lived conjugal life” of her and her spouse. Traditionally, marriages are valid or not at the time that the vows are made. Not based on what happens in their married life afterward.

The other example that I have lists what partnership means according to a female judge in a midwestern tribunal. She was asked by a Respondent what “partnership needed to be intended at the moment of consent to show that it was not excluded.” She responded by saying that it means mutuality in giving and receiving, mutually supporting each other in the daily marital life, including good communication, realizing where each other needs help – with taking care of the children, sharing decision making, offering moral support, with housework, and so on.

Her message is: if your life together was not perfect, in other words, judges can find evidence for nullity. But to include help with housework is craziness; it’s evidence of insanity among tribunal judges.

The girl was allowed by the courts to take testosterone, live as a boy and legally change her name against her mother’s wishes, all the while living in a LBGTQ foster-care home. The courts ignore all the trauma this child has been through and push the LBGTQ agenda onto Catholic children.

My Attempt to Become a Diocesan Advocate at the Tribunal

About a year and a half ago I had a meeting with a tribunal judge about my desire to be on the list of Advocates for the Diocesan Marriage Tribunal. I had finished all the online coursework and was asking to do the last required part which is to write a libelous.

The judge would not allow me to do that until I had a face-to-face meeting with him, which is not normal for the other Advocate candidates. He asked me why I want to be an Advocate. I told him that my concern is for the children of divorce. They suffer incredibly when their parents divorce and more so when the “church” says they were never married.

I gave him three examples of what I mean:

A letter I had written to priests when I was a substitute teacher in the public schools in 2008. It’s about a kindergartener’s “bulletin-of-the-week” note saying that all she wanted for Christmas was for her parents to get back together. I have many such notes from my teaching days.

A sixteen-year-old girl who has changed her gender into a boy. This man is the judge in her father’s case petitioning for nullity of his Catholic marriage to her mother. The girl has been allowed by the courts to take testosterone, live as a boy and legally change her name against her mother’s wishes, all the while living in a LBGTQ foster-care home. The courts ignore all the trauma this child has been through and push the LBGTQ agenda onto Catholic children.

Gannon Stauch’s gruesome murder by his stepmother, Letitia Stauch, in Colorado Springs in January 2020. Gannon was shot in the mouth and stabbed 18 times in the back and chest by Letitia. His biological parents are, of course, devastated that their mission to find happiness in second marriages ended so tragically.

When I tell people about these and other disastrous effects of marriage/divorce/annulment/remarriage on children, they usually express sympathy for the victims. The judge had no reaction. He stared at me like a snake getting ready to strike. He couldn’t wait to show me what he had Googled about me on the Internet: a booklet I wrote that is on Amazon. It’s titled Your Marriage is Valid; Your Declaration of Nullity is Not; a canon lawyer reviewed it for me to make sure I had not made canonical errors. I based it on Dignitas Connubii, the Vatican handbook to be observed by diocesan tribunals in handling causes of the nullity of marriage. The judge, from behind his desk, was furious at me for writing such a thing. I had not even met him when I wrote it in 2017. He took it very personally.

I wrote his bishop my report of the following. This bishop has always answered my letters; he ignored this one.

I told him that I attended an Advocates Seminar at which a case was presented, and the participants were asked to decide whether the marriage was valid. Only the Petitioner in that case took part; the Respondent, allegedly, could not be located. This couple had been married in the Catholic Church, but the male Petitioner said that she, the Respondent, used contraceptives the entire time that they lived together until they divorced six years after marrying. There was no explanation as to why she used them. Did he make her? Did they want to postpone children? Did she have a medical condition that the doctors advised her to take them? There was no indication as to why this happened.

I asked the judge why nothing was said at the Seminar about the fact that the couple was sinning mortally by using contraceptives. He said he “does not do sin.” Since he does not do sin, isn’t it reasonable to conclude that he is not concerned about couples committing adultery if their valid marriages are ruled invalid?

The gentleman whom I am writing about served as their judge and declared their marriage null because, as he reasons, she must have intended not to have children from the beginning since she used means not to get pregnant during their time together. He asked the participants if he made a correct (or “good”) decision, and the Defender of the Bond stood up and told him and all of us at the Seminar that he made a wrong decision.

When I mentioned this, Mr. Judge became livid. It is how he decides cases and it is the way the “Church” does it now. A marriage is not valid from the moment the vows are spoken; the bond does not exist until the couple has achieved some ideal degree of mutual self-donation, some “true” communion of life and love, some “complete” consortium vitae, etc. These are not the judge’s exact words. I am paraphrasing.

I argue that this thinking is wrong because others have argued that, if this is true, some couples might be said to achieve marriage immediately, others after two weeks, others after ten years, and still others give up and file for civil divorce despite having completed the Church’s requirement and having unity at some point. Those who give up and divorce are the ones the judge says he deals with most often.

When I pointed out to him that the Defender of the Bond disagreed with his ruling, he said that she could have appealed it. I am very concerned that she told the class that he made a wrong decision, yet she did not appeal it. Both the judge and DOB are failing to defend marriages the way Dignitas Connubii instructs them to.

I asked the judge why nothing was said at the Seminar about the fact that the couple was sinning mortally by using contraceptives. He said he “does not do sin.”

Since he does not do sin, isn’t it reasonable to conclude that he is not concerned about couples committing adultery if their valid marriages are ruled invalid? At least some people want the Declaration of Nullity so that they don’t commit adultery by entering a second marriage. The first page of the Diocesan Tribunal web site has this statement: The Salvation of Souls is the Supreme Law. That’s all. Nothing more in the advocate coursework is said about salvation, damnation, sin. How does your tribunal consider eternal salvation if judges "don’t do sin" and use a different philosophy about the validity of marriage than the time of consent?

In the case of the young girl above who is trying to turn herself into a boy, her father is living in an invalid civil “marriage.” The Petitioner’s first marriage was ruled valid, receiving a Negative decision in the first instance in another diocese. He filed an appeal in the diocese I am referring to because he stated that he wants to invalidate his first marriage to give his civil “wife” a Catholic Church wedding. That’s just appalling. The loose-thinking gentleman is the judge. His diocesan tribunal has the reputation of liberally interpretating marriage cases.

I have been singled out from the other candidates who were at the Advocates Seminar because I reminded the judge that the Defender of the Bond disagreed with the decision he had made in the case presented to us and because I wrote a booklet picturing my beautiful grandparents and quoting Dignitatis Connubii.

Conclusion

Charles Dickens wrote serialized stories about the way children were neglected that were immensely popular in his lifetime. They were denied proper food and living quarters and forced to work in dangerous conditions for long periods of time with little or no pay. He did not, however, emphasize the contribution to their miserable lives of their parents’ failure to make or keep their marriage vows. The Anglican religion is based obviously on Henry VIII’s divorce/remarriage and granting himself an annulment. So many of them do not see the evil in divorce/remarriage. Few people in any age, beginning with the Pharisees whom Jesus called a brood of vipers have seen any real evil in putting away one wife (or husband) and taking another. It’s what people want to do.

When Oliver Twist was born, his mother’s physician checked her left hand and lamented the absence of a wedding ring. Another poor baby born out of wedlock, he commented. At the end of some of the many edited editions, the rest of the story tells how Oliver’s father had gotten his mother pregnant while divorcing his first wife. Then the father died unexpectedly, leaving Oliver and his mother at the mercy of Mr. Bumble and company.

Dickens was very good at telling stories critical of the social conventions of his age. The annulment scandal of our present age has created social conventions that are just as evil.

Mrs. Sheryl Temaat, B.A. English, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs; M.A. Education, Regis University, Denver, CO. She is published in Homiletic and Pastoral Review, The Denver Post, the Colorado Springs Gazette, the Colorado Springs Catholic Herald, Twin Circle, the Latin Mass Magazine, and The Remnant.

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