Q: Can alcoholism, or some other addiction, invalidate a Catholic marriage?
I’m asking this question because my divorced daughter is starting the annulment process. She spoke with someone at the marriage tribunal, who I gather is expected to help her submit her documentation, and that person got fixated on her ex-husband’s drinking problems.
I am absolutely certain that even though my ex-son-in-law does have a serious problem with alcohol, at their wedding he was totally sober. He knew what he was saying when he said his vows. My husband and I were standing right there and if he had been incapacitated we would have instantly known.
… I’m very concerned that officials in our diocese may be handing out annulments like candy, inventing unsound reasons to give my daughter what she wants even if it isn’t legally justifiable.… –Kim
A: It’s impossible to address the specific case of Kim’s daughter’s marriage here—because we don’t have anywhere near enough information to assess her particular situation, even in the most cursory way. Nevertheless, Kim has raised a more general question which definitely can be addressed: what role, if any, can addiction (to alcohol, drugs, gambling, pornography, etc.) play in the invalidity of a marriage? Let’s briefly review what the Church teaches about matrimonial consent, and then take a closer look at how this might be affected by addiction. Along the way, we can also stop to focus on some aspects of the marriage-nullity process which are relevant in cases like this. Finally, we’ll examine the notion that some Tribunals may be “handing out annulments like candy,” as Kim puts it.
As we’ve seen in many articles in this space, including “Marriage and Annulment” and “How Can Arranged Marriages Be Valid?” among others, the Church holds that consent makes the marriage (c. 1057.1). In fact, the Church’s position is that for any marriage—Catholic or not!—to be considered valid, both spouses must be consenting freely and knowingly to marry each other. (See “Why Would Non-Catholics Get an Annulment?” for more on this issue.)
This is why a person can never validly be forced to marry, against his/her will (c. 1103, and see also “Can a Catholic Ever Elope?” ). Along different but equally relevant lines, freely consenting to marry another person must by definition involve knowing who it is that you’re marrying (see “Sacraments and Personal Identity” for a more in-depth discussion of this): if you are deliberately deceived into marrying someone who is, in reality, significantly different from the person whom you thought you were marrying, the marriage could be found invalid due to fraud (c. 1098), as we saw in “Canon Law and Fraudulent Marriages.”
If you have to give your consent, this naturally implies that you first have to know what you’re consenting to. Marriage is defined in canon 1055 (known as a “theological canon,” since it explains the Church’s teaching and doesn’t actually require us to do anything):
The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life … is ordered by its nature to the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring …
The essential properties (see c. 1056) and essential elements of marriage, to which spouses must agree if their marriage is to be considered valid, were discussed at length in “Contraception and Marriage Validity.” After even a brief review, it should become evident that marriage-preparation courses, required in so many parts of the world before a wedding can take place in the Catholic Church, play a pivotal role in ensuring that prospective spouses understand precisely what it is that they’re doing when they exchange consent!
Let’s now take this idea of consent even further. At the moment during the wedding ceremony when the spouses exchange consent, they both have to mean what they’re saying. Absent some proof to the contrary, the law requires us to assume that the spouses’ intentions correspond to their words and actions during the wedding (c. 1101.1). Yet Kim is right, when she indirectly observes that if a spouse is so intoxicated or high on drugs at the time when he/she is exchanging the marriage vows, that he/she is genuinely unable to understand and to will what’s being said, the consent is defective, even if the right words are all pronounced correctly. If this defective consent can be proven, the marriage can be declared null. We took a look at this particular issue in “Can You Marry Validly While Intoxicated?”
But it doesn’t appear that anyone is alleging, in the case of Kim’s daughter, that her husband was too intoxicated at the wedding ceremony to be able to exchange consent. Rather, what seems to be at issue here is the notion that the husband’s alcoholism, already a problem before their wedding, may have been severe/advanced enough to have rendered his consent defective. How could this be?
Matrimonial consent is defined in canon 1057.2 as an act of the will, by which a man and a woman by an irrevocable covenant mutually give and accept one another for the purpose of establishing a marriage. If for some reason you are completely sober, but are nonetheless unable to place an act of the will at the time of your wedding, that logically implies that you are unable to consent to marry your spouse. And if you can’t give your consent, then you can’t marry validly.
This is why the Church holds that persons who are truly unable to think rationally—including, but not limited to, those who have serious mental disabilities or illnesses—are incapable of marrying (c. 1095), because among other things, they can’t make this necessary act of the will. To be fair, this is a tremendous oversimplification of the full issue, as there are innumerable gradations of the “mental disabilities or illnesses” just mentioned, as well as emotional issues (sometimes stemming from traumatic experiences in childhood), which may render a person incapable of consenting to marriage as the Church understands it. Incidentally, this is why marriage tribunals around the world routinely spend many hours/days/weeks/months on certain cases, trying to sort out whether a spouse’s consent was defective or not. It is quite common for judges to seek input from medical doctors and psychologists, who can submit a professional assessment of a spouse’s mental state, in order to aid the judges in reaching their decision.
The undeniable fact is, there are plenty of alcoholics (and other addicts) in the world who nevertheless manage to lead productive lives at the same time. When these so-called “functional alcoholics” sober up, they are able to work hard, sustain personal and professional relationships, and generally behave in a “normal” way despite their addiction. At the same time, though, it’s also possible for alcoholism to advance to a stage where it controls a person’s life—in which case the addict finds himself genuinely unable to make life choices like getting married. Alcoholism can, if unchecked, eventually lead to its own sort of mental illness (see here for more on this). Think about it: if all you care about is feeding your addiction, everything else in your world is subservient to that need. Under such circumstances, how can you rationally, freely decide that yes, you want to marry X person and share your life with him/her—thereby establishing the “partnership of the whole of life” described in canon 1055 above?
It’s worth emphasizing again that the medical diagnoses of these sorts of conditions is well outside the purview of the typical canon lawyer, which is why only a bare-bones summary of the issue is provided here. What a canonist at a Tribunal has to recognize is that addiction can, in some cases, vitiate marital consent. If a case like this comes before a Marriage Tribunal, it’s a pretty safe bet that psychological experts will be asked to weigh in on the person’s mental/emotional state, to try to determine whether at the time of the marriage the person was even able to make an act of the will, consenting to get married.
(While we’re on this subject, it’s worth pointing out that while medical and other experts may often be consulted by Tribunal officials, these experts have no business actually determining the validity of the marriage. It’s their role to give their professional opinion as to whether the party did in fact have the mental/emotional capacity to understand the concept of marriage as the Church describes it {c. 1055.1}, and the ability to choose to share the whole of his life henceforth with his prospective spouse, etc. In contrast, it’s the duty of the Tribunal judge(s) to decide, based at least in part on that professional opinion, whether the spouse placed an act of defective consent at the time of the wedding. It may sound like semantics, but this distinction is crucial: determining the validity of a marriage is the responsibility of the judge, who is presumably trained in both canon law and Catholic theology—not of a scientist whose expertise lies in a different direction. If Tribunal judges find that psychological experts are declaring that “this marriage is invalid,” and/or are themselves blindly accepting analyses of marital validity made by those who have no authority to make this sort of determination … this can raise serious questions in turn about the legal procedure used by the Tribunal to arrive at its final decision.)
If readers are wondering how common the situation of Kim’s daughter is, note that in some countries, the abovementioned canon 1095 is by far the most common ground for marriage nullity used by Marriage Tribunals. (Here, for example, is a good overview in English of the situation in Poland.) This does not imply, however, that most marriage-nullity cases involve severe alcoholism! If you look at the wording of this canon, you’ll see that the several sections of canon 1095 address a much broader category, of which addiction is only a part:
Can. 1095: The following are incapable of contracting marriage:
n. 1. those who lack the sufficient use of reason;
n. 2. those who suffer from a grave defect of discretion of judgment concerning the essential matrimonial rights and duties mutually to be handed over and accepted;
n. 3. those who are not able to assume the essential obligations of marriage for causes of a psychic nature.
“Causes of a psychic nature” can and does mean many different things. A marriage could conceivably be found to be invalid under c. 1095 n. 3 if, to cite only a few examples, one spouse was mentally ill at the time of the marriage; or if one spouse had been severely damaged emotionally by great trauma earlier in life (such as a sex-abuse victim); or if one spouse is in the grip of such tremendous addiction to something that he/she can’t mentally grasp the need to will “a partnership of the whole of life” with the other spouse.
You don’t have to be a canon lawyer to appreciate that in today’s hedonistic, largely godless society, canon 1095 n. 3 could be applied to an awful lot of people! Kim wonders whether the Tribunal in her diocese “may be handing out annulments like candy,” and while that’s certainly possible, it’s also quite possible that a lot of annulment petitions are being approved there because a lot of marriages really are invalid. Remember that a Tribunal which is working properly isn’t creating invalid marriages; it’s merely recognizing that the nullity of a given marriage is a fact. If modern society is loaded with people who suffer from mental illness, it should be understandable that many people who attempt to marry in the Catholic Church may be genuinely unable to do so.
An interesting analysis of this issue was written in English by a now-deceased former 
judge on the Roman Rota, one of the Church’s supreme courts in Rome. Msgr. Cormac Burke, an Irish cleric and member of Opus Dei (discussed in “Opus Dei and Personal Prelatures”) wrote scores of very technical legal decisions which are not publicly accessible, but in retirement he also wrote some articles intended for the general Catholic reading public. One of them addressed this question: are there too many annulments?
It may be tempting to grumble that Tribunals declare too many marriages to be invalid; but as the late Msgr. Burke rightly pointed out,
…[T]he real underlying problem … is not the number of declarations of nullity but the number of failed marriages. Not all failed marriages are entitled to be declared null; but it is fairly evident that if we can reduce the number of marital failures, we are going to have less petitions for nullity.
So what should be our takeaways from all of this? Firstly, if someone with a drinking problem or some other type of addiction gets married, this addiction does not automatically render the marriage invalid; but in severe cases, it could be possible that the addiction rendered the person unable to consent. Secondly, if this sort of issue comes before a Tribunal, odds are high that the judges will have to involve psychologists or other experts who can assess the person’s mental/emotional state at the time of the wedding, thereby providing info which will assist the judges in reaching a conclusion—without telling those judges what the conclusion should be.
Thirdly, we shouldn’t be all that surprised if we find that there seem to be an awful lot of annulments which are granted by diocesan Marriage Tribunals—because in our warped modern society, there are an awful lot of people who for one reason or another, don’t/can’t will consent to marriage as the Church understands it.
Wouldn’t it be great if Marriage Tribunals had nothing to do? Let’s pray that our young people of marriageable age learn the right outlook on life, and thus will be both willing and able to share their lives with their spouses in a way that truly befits the sacrament of marriage.
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