UPDATE ADDED 12/15/09: Some of the information in this post is now out of date. See this post by Jimmy Akin. Original post follows.
Jimmy Akin and Ed Peters The Blogging Canon Lawyer are all over the story about the new clarifications to the rules about formal defection from the Catholic Church.
That is, the rules under which the Church considers a person who was baptized Catholic to be Catholic no longer. They're much stricter than you might think. What does it take? How about if you stop going to church and never get confirmed? If you were baptized as a baby and are then re-baptized in another denomination (say, Baptists, who don't accept infant baptism as valid) are you then no longer Catholic? How about if you start confessing the faith of Islam? What if you stand on a soapbox in public and loudly renounce the beliefs of the Church one by one? What if you merely spend forty years saying "I used to be Catholic but now I'm not?" Will the Church call you a "former Catholic?"
Nope. I'll let Jimmy summarize:
The upshot is that in order to formally defect one must:
- Decide to leave the Church (which supposes an act of heresy, apostasy, or schism)
- Put this decision into effect ("realize" it),
- Manifest this decision externally by submitting it in writing to the Ordinary (normally the bishop) or one's pastor, and
- Get the Ordinary or pastor to agree that you really have performed the act of will to leave the Church described above and thus committed heresy, apostasy, or schism.
It is then to be noted in the parish baptismal register that you have so defected.
If any of those things is lacking, you haven't defected. You're still Catholic, according to the Church.
Why does it matter? Who cares if the Church bureaucracy knows that Joe Schmo calls himself a Baptist now?
To the average Catholic or person-calling-himself-a-former-Catholic, the most likely ramifications have to do with marriages and declarations of nullity (commonly referred to as "annulments.") One example: Annulments for defect of form are probably going to be easier to obtain. Ed Peters puts it this way:
Because it is now clearly harder to prove that a given Catholic has defected formally from ecclesiastical communion, that means that the number of Catholics still bound by the requirement of canonical form (1983 CIC 1108 and 1117) for marriage is higher than some might have thought, which in turn means that more "marriages outside the Church" can be found null for violating canonical form.
Why's this? People who are Catholics are not able to contract a valid marriage outside the Catholic Church without obtaining a dispensation. If you're Catholic, and years ago you got hitched at City Hall or at Good Book Baptist Church without proper permission, that marriage isn't canonically valid. Consequently, obtaining a declaration of nullity is really straightforward and easy, should you wish to marry someone else who happens to be a practicing Catholic.
On the other hand, if you're not Catholic, and you got hitched outside the Church to another person who is also not Catholic, that marriage is presumed to be valid until proven otherwise. Consequently you have to prove there was something else wrong from the beginning. Obtaining a declaration of nullity is thus more involved and perhaps impossible.
In other words, it's pretty important to know whether either party in a union was Catholic at the time of the wedding or not.
Ed goes on:
My impression is that US tribunals had already adopted a narrow reading of "formal defection" to begin with, so the actual impact of this Notification on raw numbers in US marriage cases will be small, but to the degree the Notification has any effect in this area, it would be to increase, not decrease, the number of annulments.
Ed also points out that the clarification raises some more questions. Maybe the clarification needs a clarification.
The explanation may give more information some people who are confused about a common, yet sticky etiquette situation: Whether they should, or shouldn't, attend weddings outside the Church when bride and/or groom is "formerly Catholic" and the proper dispensations haven't been sought.
To my knowledge there's not automatically a moral imperative to avoid giving the appearance of support in such situations --- it probably depends on one's relationship to the bride and groom and the likely consequences of visibly withdrawing one's approval --- but I'm sure that for some people, a question that likely confuses the issue is "Is this guy really even technically Catholic anymore? I don't even know if canonical form applies here." Well, now you know.
But Jimmy points out that the pastoral situation --- created not so much by the clarification itself as by the failure of the Church hierarchy to be clear in the first place --- is itself quite sticky.
As a result of doing this at this late date, there is a pastoral problem that has been created. To wit: Lots of people left the Church by what appeared at the time to be a formal act (e.g., getting baptized in the Mormon church) and got married without observing Catholic form and then they came to their senses and came back to the Church and some of them were told, "Oh, you don't need to get a convalidation. You had formally defected."
If the ... linked document is judged to be retroactive then guess what: Those people do need a convalidation and they're not validly married to each other right now!
Fortunately, according to Jimmy, canon law as written appears to forbid bishops or tribunals from applying the clarification retroactively in this way.
Incidentally... yes, it can be very weird, being me, to attend a wedding of a formerly-identified-as-Catholic-person outside the Church, or any other wedding in which I have enough inside knowledge to know that the union probably doesn't constitute a valid marriage. (I say probably because I'm not a tribunal --- I don't have authority to judge. Just the intelligence to suspect.) It always feels really strange and foreign to me.
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