In order to marry validly in the Catholic Church, each party must be free from any prior marital bonds. If your former spouse has a prior marriage which has not been declared invalid by a Catholic Tribunal, they may have a Ligamen case. (Ligamen is Latin for a “previous bond.”) The Catholic Church believes that this bond of marriage is still intact, and therefore your former spouse was not free to commit to the subsequent marriage with you.
 
A Previous Bond (Ligamen) Case is handled by an administrative process which involves gathering the necessary documents and other information that demonstrate that a prior valid marriage existed at the time of the marriage in question. It also requires contacting the other party to request information about his or her baptismal status and marital history. With few exceptions, Ligamen cases are marriages between people that were not Catholic.

Ligamen Petition

An Absence of Form case (also known as a Lack of Form) is an administrative process that is used when Catholics marry outside the Church without having received a dispensation from Catholic form of marriage (i.e., the way that Catholics are bound by law to contract marrigae).  This is technically called a declaration of nullity based on an absence of form because the parties did not exchange vows before a priest and two witnesses in a Catholic church as is required by Canon 1108 §1 of the Code of Canon Law. When Catholics fail to observe this law, the marriage is invalid from the beginning. These absence of form cases account for more than half of all the annulments granted in the Catholic Church.
 
An absence of form case can only come into play if one of the parties to the marriage is a Catholic, thus bound to the Catholic form for marriage.  (This applies even to non-practicing or fallen-away Catholics.)  In a case involving a lack of canonical form due to a wedding taking place “outside” the Catholic Church, the Tribunal must be able to establish certain facts including the following: that the Catholic party was bound by canonical form, that no dispensation from form was granted for the Catholic to be validly married in a non-Catholic wedding ceremony, and that the marriage was never subsequently convalidated or otherwise rendered valid in the eyes of the Catholic Church.
 
Thus, for example, in a case where a Catholic would simply contract marriage by a Justice of the Peace, the marriage would be considered invalid due to absence of proper canonical form.

ABSENCE OF FORM PETITION

ABSENCE OF FORM Petition (COMPUTER FILLABLE FORM)

Absence of Form Petition-Spanish