Personal note: I'm agnostic.
I know a man who is seeking an annulment from a previous marriage. They were married over 15 years, and had kids. The divorce was over 20 years ago, and since then he's been married again, although not a Catholic ceremony, and his wife from that marriage died. He is now remarried again, in a civil ceremony. The annulment sounds like it is more paperwork than anything else.
I can't even possibly understand why the man wants to put his kids through an annulment. Sure, they're grown, but why revisit an old divorce and bring up the wounds from that when you've already accepted two civil marriages since then?
Is it so important to have the Catholic Church recognize a third marriage that it is worth seeking a way to invalidate the standing of a previous Catholic wedding? And why would the Church think that way?
Of course, the real villain here - and they are the villain in my eyes - is the Catholic Church. They're trying to play it both ways - divorce is wrong but if you can somehow invalidate the previous Catholic wedding, it doesn't count no matter how many years you were together and how many offspring you have. Hypocritical. And the Church will probably get what they deserve, a big F.O. from the kids of this man and the end of the line of Catholicism as the family religion as far as their offspring go.
I found the following definition from a Catholic Church website on annulment:
What is a Church annulment?
Unlike a divorce, which states that a marriage that once existed no longer does, an annulment is a declaration by the Catholic Church that the prior union never had the binding force that characterizes marriage. An annulment does not deny the reality of the wedding or the experience of the spouses during married life, but rather says that because something was seriously defective when the bride and groom spoke their wedding vows, the marriage lacked the binding force that Jesus taught.
There's something defective in this whole process, but it's the rules the Church claims to go by, not the institution of marriage.
I wonder how many annulments the Catholic Church approved in the United States last year?