Catholics, 'Omnium In Mentum' clarification?

strobe

Hi Catholics (or anyone in the know), I was wondering if you could give me your thoughts on the change in Canon Law, Omnium In Mentum, which came into effect in April. Or are you aware of any clarification from the Vatican on what exactly it means.

http://communio.stblogs.org/Omnium%20in%20mentem%20trans%20Haverstock.pdf

Does this mean that there is now no process for formal defection from the Catholic Church or just that the marriage will be invalid no matter what now? Does this mean there is now be no circumstance under which the Church will consider someone baptised to no longer be a Catholic?

Thanks.

hivizman

I'm not a lawyer (or even a Roman Catholic), but reading the document Omnium in Mentem and also the Code of Canon Law, I think that this just relates to marriage. Reading between the lines of Omnium in Mentem, it seems that some people who had formally defected from the Church and then entered into marriage with a non-Roman Catholic were claiming that their marriage was valid under Canon Law because of the exclusion of those who had formally defected from the provisions of various marriage-related canons. Indeed, some people, the document seems to be suggesting, were deliberately defecting where, for various reasons, it was difficult to get permission for a "mixed marriage", and then re-entering the Church while asserting that their marriage had to be recognised as valid by the Church.

The implication of the change is that someone who defects and marries a non-Catholic does not enter into a marriage that the Church will regard as valid, so that, if they re-enter the Church, they will not be considered as married in the eyes of the Church. Someone who has formally defected and wishes to marry a non-Catholic should still, under Canon Law, obtain a dispensation, which presumably they will not do as they have left the Church.

I'm not sure whether a Roman Catholic who wishes to marry someone who has formally defected needs a dispensation - presumably if the person has joined a church not in full communion with Rome, then a dispensation will be required under Canon 1124, while if the person who has defected is no longer a Christian, the Church would not even consider a dispensation and no marriage would be valid in the eyes of the Church.

But defection is still available, as far as I can ascertain.

Coriolanus

The Church itself apparently has been able to answer whether defection will be recognized in the future or not. They're currently taking the change under advisement.

countmeout.ie wrote:

Suspension of the Defection Process

In April of this year, the Catholic Church modified the Code of Canon Law to remove all references to the act of formal defection, the process used by those who wish to formally renounce their membership of the Church.

Since then, the Catholic Church in Ireland has been reflecting on the implications of this change for those who wish to leave the Catholic Church. Despite our requests for clarification, the Church have yet to reach a firm position on how or whether they will continue to accept requests for the annotation of the baptismal register.

In recent weeks we have been contacted by an increasing number of people whose defections have not been processed, due to the limbo created by this canon law amendment.

Because of this uncertainty, we have taken the decision to suspend the creation of declarations of defection via CountMeOut.ie.


Why has the Church made this change?

The first reference to the act of formal defection was introduced in the 1983 revision of the Code of Canon Law and was intended to create a special dispensation that absolved those who had defected from canon law pertaining to marriage. The Church considers canon law to hold for everyone who has been baptised; this change introduced a special case such that the marriages of estranged former-Catholics were now considered to be valid.

In practice, the Church found this difficult to interpret, as it was unclear what the process of formal defection actually entailed. So in 1997, a process of consultation began with the intention of removing these dispensations.

In parallel to this discussion, an issue arose in countries such as Germany, where citizens are required to pay a Church Tax unless they make a statement to the tax authorities. An annotated baptismal cert was sometimes requested for this purpose, resulting in a 2006 papal note that finally explained the process of defection in more detail. These are the steps we describe on CountMeOut.ie.

This position remained unchanged until November 2009, when the Vatican approved the document "Omnium in Mentem", removing the dispensations introduced in 1983 and with them all references to formal defection. This came into effect on April 9th 2010.

Manach

Offhand, reading some commentary on EWTN, I'd say that hivizman has done a good summarising the piece.

strobe

Thanks for that answer Hivizman. On further googling around and a couple of posts to a Catholic website it seems you are bang on the money. Maybe you should rethink getting in to that whole lawyering milarky?