James DOBSON: Well, you answered that question with regard to Bill Clinton instead of referring to yourself. May I ask you to address it personally? You know, I believe you to be a professing Christian and you and I have prayed together, but when I heard you talk about this dark side of your life and when we were in Washington, you spoke of it with a great deal of pain and anguish, but you didn't mention repentance. Do you understand that word, repentance?
GINGRICH: Absolutely. And I answered … maybe it was the way the question was posed in terms of how the cross-parallels of the two things. In terms of my own life, let me say that I was raised initially as a Lutheran and I ended up converting and becoming a Southern Baptist when I was in graduate school at Saint Charles Avenue Baptist Church with Dr. Avery Lee, who was just a great, great preacher and moral leader. And so that's my background.
Newt Gingrich and his third wife, the former Callista Bisek, have renewed their three-year-old marriage vows in a Catholic ceremony in the U.S. Capitol, the bride said Thursday. (8/2003)
Her mother, Bernita Bisek, of Whitehall, Wis., who was a witness, said Newt Gingrich's second marriage had been annulled.
Callista Gingrich said her marriage was "blessed in the Catholic Church" and that "we had a very small group of family and friends" in attendance.
The ex-speaker and Marianne Gingrich were divorced in April 2000. Two years later, he asked the Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta to annul the 19-year marriage. Marianne Gingrich told reporters then that she and her husband had married in a Lutheran church in Ohio in 1981 and that neither was Catholic.
At Marquette University, Mark Johnson, an associate professor of theology, said that an annulment is a declaration by the Catholic Church that it believes that the evidence shows that a "full, sacramental marriage never took place."
"An annulment, therefore, is a declaration that whatever external appearances there may have been to the contrary, what we thought was a marriage was in fact null," he said.
"An annulment, therefore, is a declaration that whatever external appearances there may have been to the contrary, what we thought was a marriage was in fact null," he said.
He said that when a Catholic weds a divorced person, they are barred from being married by a priest and would "risk grave scandal" if he or she took Holy Communion.
Asked how the church could annul a marriage between two non- Catholics, Johnson said: "The Catholic Church believes, and this is going to sound impolitic, that it has the fullest understanding of what a sacramental marriage is and the right to make judgment about the sacramental status of any Christian marriage."
When congressman Newt Gingrich was a graduate student at Tulane
University I baptized him by immersion into the membership of the St.
Charles Avenue Baptist Church. Perhaps I didn't hold him under long
enough.
-- Rev. G. Avery Lee
callista bisek photo, marianne gingrich photo, jackie gingrich photo
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