Taking Vows: Offering Our Own Integrity
The marriage vows during the wedding ceremony are the formal way that the couple make their covenant with each other. A vow is a solemn promise. It is not simply an ordinary promise, made in good faith but able to be broken later if circumstances change. A vow has a sacred quality because when we take a vow, we commit our entire being to it. We offer our own integrity as the substance of the vow. If we later break the vow, we break our own integrity.
The Validity of the Vows
The vows of marriage are a sacred matter, so the church tries to ensure that when a couple marry, they know what these vows entail. The vows must be given freely and knowledgeably in order to be valid, or true and binding. Consequently, before the promises are given, both persons must have the following:
Freedom from pressures: Many internal and external pressures can weaken a person's ability to consent freely to marriage, making the vows invalid. The pressure may be as blatant as a demand by the parents of a pregnant teenage girl that the baby's father marry their daughter. Or the pressure may be felt in a home where quarreling or alcoholism pushes a desperate son or daughter to escape through marriage.
Knowledge and willingness: For marriage vows to be considered valid by the church, both persons also must know what marriage, especially the marriage promises, really means; they must have the capacity and the willingness to fulfill their promises. For example, if either person decides before the marriage that she or he does not want children and will not have them but fails to tell the other person, the vows could be considered invalid because of lack of knowledge by one partner and lack of willingness to fulfill the marriage promises by the other partner.
If Vows Are Not Taken Freely and Knowledgeably
Without sufficient time to discern the essential dynamics of their relationship, a couple may actually say the words of the marriage promises but not really be free enough from internal and external forces or knowledgeable enough to make a valid promise. The church will grant an annulment for a marriage that has ended legally in divorce if a church tribunal determines that the marriage vows were invalid from the beginning. In cases where the church does grant an annulment sometime after a marriage has ended, it concludes that at the time of the wedding ceremony, one or both of the persons were not able to make a valid vow. Therefore, the marriage was never a valid sacrament in the eyes of the church.
Annulment is not divorce. A divorce dissolves the legal contract of marriage, whereas an annulment acknowledges that as a sacrament, the marriage never existed. Some people confuse these terms, but they describe two distinct realities.