It has been three years since I was baptized and confirmed into the Catholic Church. It was April Vigil of 2022 when that happened, and I haven’t looked back since. I was born into the Seventh-day Adventist church and remained involved with it until the summer of my ninth year.
It was then that I insisted upon stop going and instead I started going to the Mormon church in Las Vegas. In 1987, I was baptized and remained a member of the church until I left for Catholicism. I have actually been attending my local parish since 2021, but in order to join, I first had to go through the RCIA process.
This is a required experiences for adults who wish to convert to the world’s oldest and most influential religion. I started attending in, I think, April, and RCIA didn’t start until September. So, I took the required classes and on Easter Vigil, I officially became Catholic.
Over the past few years, I have served in a variety of capacities. I have been a sacristan, an altar server and a lector. I also serve as an usher, helping collect offerings every week. I am then one of the people responsible for collecting the offering bags after Mass is over and then securing them so that they can be counted on Saturday afternoons or perhaps on Mondays.
I also volunteer weekly in the rectory (office), doing data entry tasks for the food pantry that the parish runs twice a week. Furthermore, I am active in the parish’s Holy Name Society. I also help with Stations of The Cross when it takes place during Lent.
But I want to go further. I want to serve as a Eucharistic Minister. There’s just one problem. Or at least there was. I am currently married, as I have been for over twenty years. But I was married before and that marriage thankfully ended in a very bitter divorce. Accordingly, the Catholic Church considered me married and as such, I couldn’t proceed.
So, in 2022, I started the nullification process, a procedure conducted by a special tribunal at the diocese that concluded this past Friday. Today, I received official confirmation that my first marriage has been annulled and that opens more doors for me within the Church.
Actually, the marriage was annulled last month, but there had to be a waiting period in order for any concerned party to be able to appeal that decision. The window for appeals closed on the 9th, making it final. If anyone had appealed, it would have paused the annulment. But that didn’t happen. I mean, seriously…who would have appealed it? I can assure you that my ex-wife doesn’t care.
They wanted to get in touch with her to get her testimony in regards to the absurdity of the marriage, but they were unable to find her. Of course, I have no way of finding out where she is now, or for that matter, whether she’s even still alive. That’s how little I know or care about her current whereabouts. I am grateful that they proceeded without her input.
I don’t know why the process took three years. The Catholic Church is very formal and has its canon law. I respect that. There are certain ways of doing things and everything has to be done correctly, especially in cases such as this. But three years? It really doesn’t matter anymore. It is all said and done.
I am grateful to have the process become final. The annulment was granted on the basis that my first wife and I were young and stupid and didn’t fully realize what we did given that we rushed into marriage in order to get her into the Army, an effort that proved unavailing, meaning that we got married for nothing.
So now, I am free to or at least am eligible to more fully participate. Does that mean that I’ll automatically become a EM? No, not at all. As I stated, there is a process and I am now eligible to go through that process based on whether or not the priest believes that I am ready.
Now why exactly was there a need to have it nullified? Well, the bible makes it very clear. Except under certain circumstances, remarriage after divorce is actually considered adultery. The bible does allow for remarriage if there was adultery or disbelief involved. At the time, neither one of us were in any way involved in the Catholic Church. I was Mormon, she was Methodist.
That first marriage was an absolute disaster, and I am sad to say that, yes, I did in fact commit adultery several times, which lead to the divorce, among many other reasons. I’m pretty sure that she did the same during the time that we were together, so I really don’t feel all that guilty, though I can’t prove that she slept with other men until we separated. But then again, I didn’t care then, because I was getting action, and I don’t care now.
I don’t know why I wasn’t asked about adultery, because if they had, maybe, just maybe the process wouldn’t have taken years.
But none of that matters now. It’s finally all over and the Church considers me to be married to one woman, even though she’s not Catholic. Now, if my current marriage ends in divorce, it may be difficult to impossible to get it annulled, because there’s actually no basis to annul the marriage, meaning that I would not be able to do certain things within the Church. If she dies, then the Church would consider me single and free to remarry, preferably to a Catholic woman in a physical Catholic Church.
The only problem that I have with a Catholic marriage is that counseling with the priest is involved and the whole engagement process can, I hear, take up to a year as opposed to getting married after five months of dating in my first marriage and three days of dating to get engaged in my current marriage, though our Mormon bishop refused to marry us unless we waited one month, which we did.
At one point in the Mormon faith, we were considered married for time and all eternity because we went through one of the church’s temples. But when I left the church, that bond, a bond that only exists in their eyes, was torn asunder. However, that church still recognizes that we are still married under man’s law.
Anyway, it was very welcome news to learn that the very long process of nullity is once and for all over. I am grateful to everyone who helped me along the process, including the people at the tribunal. I hope to never go through it again, but I do understand why it had to happen.