That's...Damn, even stricter than the Catholic view, at least in theory.
In Catholicism, I've come to believe, the provision that death ends the marriage is really sanity-saving, because theologically there's such an opposition to divorce (as in, it doesn't exist, period). Annulments, even though I've heard them called Church Divorces, are different: Unlike a divorce, which takes something that existed and breaks it, they declare that there was such an issue with the marriage, something so severe that the sacrament would never have been effected had it been known, such that it is declared that it never happened in the first place. (Children, for anybody keeping score at home, are still regarded as legitimate.) They're not for the faint of heart, either: It takes a full canonical trial for that to occur, with judges and lawyers and everything. Those are expensive in purely monetary terms, especially since (in dioceses in the US anyway) you generally must already have the civil divorce done, with all that that requires. Add in the fact that *every* annulment gets at least one appeal...And that appeals to the highest appellate levels in Rome are not unusual, with the process generally taking years...What it adds up to is that to annul a Catholic marriage, you must expend not-trivial amounts of time, effort, and money (dioceses don't have to charge fees, but virtually all do, as do canon lawyers and others involved) to convince multiple levels that the bond should be declared invalid. There are officials specifically tasked, even when the annulment is contested by neither partner, as "Defender of the Bond". In short, you have to jump a fairly high bar to get an annulment - and even then, the number granted by diocesan tribunals in the US is seen as too high.
Amidst all this is the reality that some marriages should never have been entered into in the first place, or that even if the marriage itself is happy, in-laws can make it difficult.
Hence, death terminates the bond. This is, to many people, a good thing. Past death, you don't *need* your partner, anyway. If you're to enter Heaven, you have eternity with God to look forward to.
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ninetydegrees
(no subject)
In Catholicism, I've come to believe, the provision that death ends the marriage is really sanity-saving, because theologically there's such an opposition to divorce (as in, it doesn't exist, period). Annulments, even though I've heard them called Church Divorces, are different: Unlike a divorce, which takes something that existed and breaks it, they declare that there was such an issue with the marriage, something so severe that the sacrament would never have been effected had it been known, such that it is declared that it never happened in the first place. (Children, for anybody keeping score at home, are still regarded as legitimate.) They're not for the faint of heart, either: It takes a full canonical trial for that to occur, with judges and lawyers and everything. Those are expensive in purely monetary terms, especially since (in dioceses in the US anyway) you generally must already have the civil divorce done, with all that that requires. Add in the fact that *every* annulment gets at least one appeal...And that appeals to the highest appellate levels in Rome are not unusual, with the process generally taking years...What it adds up to is that to annul a Catholic marriage, you must expend not-trivial amounts of time, effort, and money (dioceses don't have to charge fees, but virtually all do, as do canon lawyers and others involved) to convince multiple levels that the bond should be declared invalid. There are officials specifically tasked, even when the annulment is contested by neither partner, as "Defender of the Bond". In short, you have to jump a fairly high bar to get an annulment - and even then, the number granted by diocesan tribunals in the US is seen as too high.
Amidst all this is the reality that some marriages should never have been entered into in the first place, or that even if the marriage itself is happy, in-laws can make it difficult.
Hence, death terminates the bond. This is, to many people, a good thing. Past death, you don't *need* your partner, anyway. If you're to enter Heaven, you have eternity with God to look forward to.