See the fascinating places your blog can take you:Yesterday's blogging on annulments led a reader to wonder about a crucial plot point in Brideshead Revisited:
In reading the posts on annulment here and elsewhere, it occurred to me
to wonder, why is Lady Julia Flyte (a Catholic who marries the previously married Rex Mottram in "Brideshead Revisited") not free to
marry again when Charles asks her to do so?
I have always been led to believe that even under the strictest judges,earlier in the last century, Catholics who erred by marrying divorced persons could marry again because their original marriages were not valid in the first place. What's more, Waugh seems to have known or found this out at some point in his life: when his friend Anne Rothermere (divorced from Lord Rothermere) married Ian Fleming, she expected him to be horrified but found to her surprise that he was pleased, since her marriage to the divorced Lord Rothermere was not canonically valid in the first place. So why couldn't Lady Julia marry harles? Or was her refusal merely a self-imposed penance for having married the idiotic Mottram?
The answer, swiped from another source because I'm lazy and because I've still got 20 letters to go:
Julia is free to marry whomsoever she pleases, as long as that person is Catholic and unmarried; the Church would not have recognised her marriage to Rex as valid since in its eyes he had a wife living. She merely needs to be free in the eyes of the state - and her divorce will see to that.
But she and Charles still cannot marry, for in the eyes of the Church he is validly married to Celia. The Church will not rule on the validity of a marriage contracted between two people who were not Catholics and possibly give an annulment, as it might do with a Catholic marriage : such interference does not fall within its sphere. It does not, moreover, accept divorce in either Catholic or non-Catholic worlds. Thus, the divorces that both Rex and Charles have obtained do not have any validity in the eyes of the Church. So though the ‘marriage’ with Rex is no barrier to her, Julia still cannot marry Charles.
If Julia had gone ahead and married Charles, the union would not have been recognised by the Church. She realises that she needs now to acknowledge and affirm the love of God, and that this need requires the denial of a life with Charles. She must place the love of God before her love of Charles.
An interesting thought is that after he became a Catholic, Charles might have been able to pursue an annulment of his marriage with Celia. (EW himself successfully did this very thing and after much waiting had his marriage to Evelyn Gardner annulled.) If an annulment had been granted, he and Julia would have been free to marry.
That was then, this is now. I don't know when this changed, but these days, marriages between non-Catholics can be annulled by the Catholic Church. . It's the logical consequence of
recognizing those marriages as valid (like "Protestant" baptisms which are simply Christian baptisms in Protestant Churches.). I have mixed feelings about this. I worked in a parish as a DRE, with the RCIA, and you cannot imagine the pain and confusion that arises when people cannot become Catholic right now because they are in a second marriage, but they have to get their first
marriage, contracted when they were non-catholic to a non-Catholic, annulled through the Catholic church before they can validate the second marriage and then enter the Catholic Church.
It is often a nightmare.