The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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This is interesting, I have never heard of this before. You had a Christian marriage in a protestant church, and thus consider yourself to be living in serious, unrepentant sin - baring you from receiving any sacraments? I thought the church has accepted protestant marriages as sacramental since Vatican II?
The term is 'valid natural marriage'- the church accepts that it's a valid marriage but considers it a serious sin that it hasn't been performed, sacramentally, by the church.
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I don't consider myself to be living in sin. But unfortunately, the church does. My parents were Catholic, baptized my siblings and me, etc. But they chose to leave the Catholic church when I was in 5th or 6th grade, and I spent the rest of my childhood growing up Protestant. As an adult (years after I was married), I decided to go back to the Catholic church, and have been told I need to get my marriage convalidated by the church.
My understanding is that the Catholic church does consider Protestant marriages valid for converts. But because I was baptized (and got first communion), they consider me to have been Catholic the whole time and not a convert. Even though I myself would have said I wasn't Catholic (and I didn't choose to leave the church, my parents did), it means that I have to go through the same steps as someone who was a part of the Church and chose to get married outside it. It's a bit frustrating to be honest, but not much I can do. Anyways, because (according to the Church) I'm living in sin, that means no sacraments until that gets resolved (or unless I commit to living with my wife without any sex).
The "Catholics need to marry in the Church, otherwise the marriage is invalid rule" was put in place to combat couples making private vows and then one partner leaving the other high and dry... 400 years ago. The rules really should have changed by now, people's situations are so different now. But the Church is slow to change.
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