When people say expresso instead of goddamn espresso . <| sep |> Wait , was Lyndon Johnson the campaign manager for Donald Trump ? <| sep |># BECAUSE THIS TRAIN HAS NO BRAKES <| sep |> This is an article by some theologians . While I respect them , Francis is pope and has basically decided in a magisterial act not a defined dogma , sure , but demanding our assent of intellect and will that the other side in this debate is right . Your insistence that marriage is essentially a juridical reality and that God ' s primary concern is with a juridical reality tells me everything I need to know . And you wonder why Francis is so concerned with the legalism ! Of course marriage isn ' t primarily a juridical reality in God ' s eyes ! It is a human relational and spiritual reality repeat it till you ' re blue the Law for man , not man for the law , which reality is signified by an external juridicallyframed Sacrament . And while the two ideally coincide . well , Francis makes it quite clear that he favors the idea which recognizes not that marriage can ever be dissolved , but that there can be a marriage in the external forum that doesn ' t actually have the moral reality of marriage , and a subsequent relationship that does in spite of the inability to get the external recognition . So the article ' s there are only three possibilities is incorrect . They leave out the concept of a marriage for which there are , indeed , no visible canonically provable externalforum grounds for annulment though admittedly the Church has blurred the lines here by creating the infamous psychological impediment but which nevertheless never corresponded with the moral and spiritual reality of true marriage . The Church has been grappling with this for a long time . Invoking the psychological impediment has been one attempt to deal with it , but it is frankly an inartful attempt and is revealing itself as a stopgap measure that inappropriately mixes internal forum questions with external forum questions . Impediments that can actually have externalforum effects under canon law . should be external easily visible and determinable things . The attempt to square the circle or save the appearances by invoking something already as private and subjective and more naturally in the realm of the internal forum as psychological state and the vagueries of true intent . has been very unsatisfying and confused people . Which is to say , I have no doubt that many if not most of the annulments granted for subjective psychological reasons . were in fact never marriages in spirit , never had that moral reality . But , I also think it ' s getting into very thorny territory for the realm of the external forum to start trying to determine legal validity by spiritual validity . Basically , I think it ' s problematic to try to include the Spirit IN the Letter through a clause in the Letter saying something winkingly equivalent to But this Letter is invalidated if the Spirit is not met . well , yes , in one sense that goes without saying , it ' s how the relation between letter and spirit always works . But that doesn ' t mean you can somehow inscribe the spirit in the letter . Under that thinking you wind up with either such laxity that annulments do basically become Catholic divorce for anyone who wants one , or if you attempt to be more spiritually rigorous you can never be perfect in your judgments and wind up excluding a lot of people who do really deserve one while granting them to some people who don ' t . It ' s funny that Catholics have long accustomed themselves to this idea of a possible unideal , but possible disjunct between external canonical form and internal reality for things as fundamental as baptismincorporation into the Church . Few but the hardcore Feeneyites have much problem admitting today that in spite of the eternal validity of the principle no salvation outside the Church . we may nevertheless have good hope that there are people visibly outside it by any canonical standard who nevertheless have the moral and spiritual reality of communion with God invisibly in their souls . But then try to apply this to marriage and people suddenly become partisans of the principle that the visible and invisible , the letter of the law and the spirit of its moral reality . always coincide or in fact are not even two separate concepts .