In this clip, Cy Kellett welcomes Trent Horn to discuss the complexities of becoming Catholic when faced with marriage annulment issues. Trent dives into the Church’s teachings and the emotional struggles many face in navigating these rules. Tune in for insights that could change your perspective on faith and belonging!
Transcript:
Cy Kellett: Why are you not a Catholic, Ken?
Caller: They won’t let me.
Cy Kellett: They won’t what?
Caller: No, because I’m supposed to get my first marriage and.
Trent Horn: No. Okay, Ken, tell me a little bit.
Caller: Let’s just assume with that, because I won’t go through all the questions. I won’t go through them contacting my ex wife and all like that.
Trent Horn: I won’t.
Caller: I won’t have them go through this inquisition thing. So let’s just assume my marriage. First marriage can’t be annulled. So can we assume that?
Caller: Okay, so.
Caller: So I can’t be Catholic.
Trent Horn: Well, Ken, hold on a minute. Let me. Let me just try to walk through this a little bit. So are you. You were previously married and you’re. And now you’re divorced.
Caller: I’m on my second marriage for 25 years to a woman who’s more or less a Catholic, but she’s not getting her married. First marriage and not either. It’s her second marriage. So.
Cy Kellett: So you don’t feel, Ken, that you’re welcome in the Catholic Church or you don’t feel that.
Caller: Yeah, yes, I can go. I can go to mass and everything. I just can’t be a member. I can’t go. I can’t take communion or go to confession. I can attend and I can go up during the communion thing and get. Get blessed.
Trent Horn: A blessing.
Caller: So, yeah, I can do that. Yeah.
Trent Horn: Well, Ken. What. Why do you think that that is the case, Mike? What reason is there for you to not receive communion?
Caller: Because I’m not Catholic.
Trent Horn: They won’t let me. Right, right. But if you were. Right, but. Sorry. But if you were to become Catholic and not have your marriage annulled, you
Caller: can’t do that currently.
Trent Horn: Right, right. Because here. Because here’s. Well, yeah. So why. That’s the question. I want to get to, like, the reason. Cause I could understand your frustration if it was just bureaucratic.
Caller: 68 years old, my marriage. This was over 40 years ago. Neither one of us was. Cath. We didn’t know the rules. And I’m not having the church go and knock on her door, call her up and say, ask you some questions about why marriage should be enough. Not doing it.
Trent Horn: Okay.
Caller: For people from 40 years ago.
Trent Horn: No.
Caller: Well, 40 years ago, you were an adult. You were able to make decisions.
Trent Horn: This is the reason, Ken. Because Jesus said, if a person divorces In Mark chapter 10, he says, whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. Okay, so that’s Mark 10, 11. That’s not me. That’s not the Pope. That’s Jesus saying that whatsoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her. And now my question for you is, can a unrepentant adulterer go to heaven?
Caller: I can repent.
Trent Horn: Say. Right. The repenting would mean, though, you wouldn’t engage not.
Caller: I would never do it again.
Cy Kellett: But just in fairness to Ken, has someone told you that you absolutely have to contact your previous spouse? Because there. There may be instances where you don’t
Caller: have to do that. Yeah, well, I can’t trust them not to do that because they said they would. Or maybe that’s usually what’s done, but
Caller: you feel like there’s a grave reason not to.
Trent Horn: Well, Ken, let me. What kind of terms are you on with your ex wife?
Caller: Well, okay.
Trent Horn: We don’t hardly ever anything. But we’re. We don’t. You have, like. We have any big. No big beefs?
Caller: No big.
Caller: Yeah.
Trent Horn: No.
Caller: No.
Trent Horn: Okay, well, why don’t you just ask her what she thinks? Like, hey, if they called you, I know that I’m trying to figure all this out, and sometimes it could be intrusive. Why don’t you ask her? Maybe she’ll say, you know, that’s fine.
Caller: I understand. The church’s got to do what church’s got to do.
Trent Horn: Yeah,
Caller: I just want. I just want him to interview me and me alone. They can ask me anything. I can tell them, you know.
Cy Kellett: Well, Ken, just because Trent has not. But I have worked inside of a diocese, and generally speaking, the people in the tribunal, in the diocese see their work as a ministry. They don’t see it as they want to sit in judgment on other people. They just see it as a ministry. So if you had a conversation with the tribunal and said, look, here’s what I’d like to do, because I would like to receive the sacraments in the Catholic Church. Can we do this under these conditions? I mean, it might be a negotiation or it might be, you know, you’d have to talk to them and work things out, but I don’t think that they would treat you dismissively because in general, they’re ministers of the church who want to be helpful.
Trent Horn: Yeah. It would be like if you went to a doctor and the doctor said, hey, I’m worried you might have cancer. I’m not sure, but I really need to talk to your parents or any living relative you have, even if it’s from a long time ago, to try to rule out, to help you. I mean, that’s the thing with the annulments and all that stuff. Like, people often think of it as, like, hey, like, it’s a court of law. Like, somebody wins, someone loses. But it’s not an adversarial system. It’s more like, let’s just try to get all the facts and figure out what’s going on here so we can be faithful to Jesus Christ. That’s just what the tribunal wants to do. And I think if you just. If you let them know that they can work with you, but if they need to talk to people, it is really important for them. Like, they’re saying, look, Jesus has given us this command, like, being married if you’ve already been married before, that entails adultery if you’re sexually active. But if the marriage wasn’t valid, and you said, hey, we were young, we didn’t know things, that. That seems to point towards direction. It might not have been. I don’t know. But. But I think having a sense of humility and sometimes, yeah, it’s not nice to bring up the past sometimes. But in doing that, you’ve got an eternal future ahead of you to think about, too. So I just want to let you know, Ken, that, yeah, God loves you, Jesus loves you. The church loves you. Even if sometimes the people who work for the church can be a little bureaucratic. I’ve dealt with that. It’s annoying.
Caller: Yeah.
Trent Horn: We’d like to help you to be in full union with the church. You and your spouse can receive sacraments, go to heaven. I’d like to see that. And so I’m hoping that, you know, you can keep listening and work with the church. Call us back if you get a speed bump. That’s how I’m feeling. I mean, does that make sense?
Caller: Catechism again this while? Because I missed a lot because stupid Covid shutdowns, which now we know that did more harm than good.
Trent Horn: But area.
Caller: Well, maybe I’m going to go through catechism again. I’m gonna try to go to Mass and everything. And, you know, I can go to Mass and not be a member of the Catholic Church. I said I could do that.
Trent Horn: When you go to Mass. When you go to Mass, Ken. And here. I tell you what.
Caller: Give your.
Trent Horn: Give the call, screen your email. I send you two things. We’ll get your email, your contact info. I want to send you my book. Why We’re Catholic. There’s a little prayer in there called Spiritual communion for people to pray if for one reason or another, they can’t receive the Eucharist. It’s a prayer the saints have said to draw near to Jesus in the Mass and they can’t receive the Eucharist. So it’s in there. So I’d like to send that to you. Let’s just get your info. We’ll send it. And I’m grateful you’re going to give it a shot and go and check out catechism and go to your church. And I’ll ask our listeners to pray for you that everything just gets sorted out. And I think it will get sorted out for the glory of God. All right. So thanks for calling. Give the call, screen your info, and then we’ll send you all that. All right.
Cy Kellett: Thanks very, very much, Ken. I hope that you I mean, I do agree with you, Trent. I mean, you never know. You run into some people who are just very bureaucratically minded.