CARAVELí (PERU)
The Pillar [Washington DC]
October 20, 2025
German-born Bishop Reinhold Nann of Peru says he is now married.
A German news outlet reported last week that a bishop who took early retirement last year has contracted marriage civilly, despite claims that he resigned over health reasons.
The Holy See press office announced last July it had accepted the resignation of 63 year-old Bishop Reinhold Nann, the German-born prelate who led the Peruvian territorial prelature of Caravelí.
The Vatican bollettino did not give an official reason for the resignation, which came more than a decade before the usual episcopal age of retirement, though the reason cited publicly at the time was that the bishop was suffering from ill health.
But on Sunday, the German news service KNA reported that the bishop has disclosed that the actual reason for his resignation was his relationship with a local woman.
“Depression was the reason [for the resignation]; love was the cause,” the bishop told KNA, stating that when he resigned, he had informed his ecclesiastical superiors that he planned to leave the priesthood to pursue a relationship with the Peruvian woman with whom he now cohabits.
The bishop told KNA that he had struck up a relationship in the face of loneliness he encountered as a bishop, facing the “the abysses, tragedies, abuse, mediocrity and lies” which he says he encountered “the higher [he] climbed” in the Church’s hierarchy.
Nann added that in his view, the Church is “desperately clinging” to its discipline on clerical celibacy, which he said “did more harm than good,” while saying that
Although the bishop claims he told his superiors he intended to pursue a relationship with the unnamed woman, and has “married” her in a civil ceremony, he has not applied for laicization, and did not specify when he attempted the civil marriage.
So what happens, exactly, when a bishop tries to get married?
The Pillar explains:
Bishops can’t get married right?
Right.
Clerics —all those who receive the sacrament of orders — are required by canon law “to observe perfect and perpetual continence for the sake of the kingdom of heaven and therefore are bound to celibacy.”
Continence, in a word, means abstaining from sex, and celibacy means the state of being unmarried.
Men who are already married when they are ordained — permanent deacons and some married former Anglican ministers entering the Catholic Church — are sometimes directly dispensed from the obligation of continence, and there is some debate about how it applies to deacons anyway.
But the obligation to celibacy (staying unmarried) is never relaxed in the case of bishops, even in the case of former Anglican bishops who enter the Catholic church and seek priestly ordination.
But apart from the disciplinary prohibition, it’s also correct to say bishops “can’t get married” in the sense that they are unable to do so, canonically speaking, and not just forbidden.
Canon law declares that clerics who attempt marriage do so “invalidly,” because they are impeded from doing so by the reception of sacred orders.
But what if they are laicized?
Smart question. The Church teaches that sacramental ordination is indelible — that means that a person is ordained a priest, he remains a priest forever. No subsequent crime, or moral depravity, committed by a priest, can strip him of his sacred ordination.
But a bishop can lose his ministerial legal status in the Church — called the “clerical state.”
The process of losing that status is commonly called “laicization” — because a person is reduced from the status of a cleric to the status of a lay person.
Clerics can be laicized at their own request — via a personal, usually handwritten, petition to the pope, who personally has to grant it — or as a punishment by the competent ecclesiastical authority for a canonical crime.
However, even when a cleric is laicized, he is not automatically granted the freedom to marry.
Instead, clerics who petition the pope for laicization have to ask for a specific and separate dispensation from the obligation of celibacy, because it is not automatically granted with their departure from ministry.
Similarly, when a canonical penal process imposes a penalty of laicization, it does not automatically remove the obligation of celibacy — often the laicized priest will have to appeal separately for the celibacy obligation to be dispensed.
So what happens when a bishop like Nann gets ‘married’ civilly?
Well, it depends on who you ask. If you ask the local government in Peru, they’ll tell you that the bishop and the woman are married in the eyes of the state.
But the Church does not recognize marriage as an institution created by human legal authorities — either civil or canonical — but as something intended by God, and instituted in natural law.
So, while civil legal powers can define who they recognize as married for tax and benefit purposes, the Church doesn’t recognize people as “civilly married” versus “canonically married” — every marriage is either valid or invalid, on its own terms.
In the case of Bishop Nann, since he has not petitioned for laicization, and he seemingly has not been dispensed from the obligation to celibacy, his marriage is invalid, even if he gets a tax write-off in Peru.
That is why canon law speaks of clerics who “attempt marriage, even only civilly” rather than “contract marriage.” As far as the Church is concerned, Nann is living in a technical state of “concubinage.”
Apart from attempting the impossible, hasn’t the bishop committed a canonical crime?
Heck yes he has, but don’t hold your breath for anyone in a position of authority to do anything about it.
Canon law defines it as a canonical crime, or delict, “a cleric who attempts marriage, even if only civilly,” and takes the unusual step of providing for an automatic, or latae sententiae, penalty of suspension.
“If, after warning, he has not reformed or continues to give scandal, he must be progressively punished by deprivations, or even by dismissal from the clerical state,” the law says.
So you might reasonably expect that the Church would move quickly to address the public scandal of a relatively young bishop openly dissenting from the Church’s discipline and setting an example of grave sin.
While Nann has said that he informed his superiors of his desire to “leave the priesthood” and that he would be pursuing a relationship with this woman, it is not clear from the KNA report when, exactly, he attempted civil marriage.
If he attempted civil marriage before his resignation was accepted last year, canon law provides that he would have automatically lost his office as bishop of the territorial prelature — though the Holy See would have had to declare publicly the office lost for it to take effect.
Whatever the timing of his invalid attempt at marriage, since Nann has not been granted a petition for laicization by the pope he is still a bishop (and always will be) and a cleric bound by the obligation of celibacy.
In theory, he should be subject to a penal process instigated by his successor as bishop of the prelature and authorized by the Dicastery for Bishops in Rome. And, in theory, that process could — arguably should — be expected to result in his laicization as a punishment.
Of course, if laicization were imposed on the bishop as a punishment, the ordinary praxis of the Vatican, at least for priests who conduct themselves in a similar way to Nann, would be to dismiss him from the clerical state without dispensing him from the obligation of celibacy.
That dispensation is usually withheld in penal cases so that clerics who desert ministry to pursue illicit relationships are not seen to be “rewarded” by the canonical process for their actions.
So what happens now?
In practice, bishops who resign or retire for undisclosed disciplinary reasons rarely go on to face formal canonical sanctions in retirement. Regarding the specific circumstances of a bishop who leaves ministry and attempts marriage, another recent case saw the bishop’s actions formally ignored by the hierarchy.
In November 2022, the disgraced former Albany Bishop Howard Hubbard announced that he had petitioned Pope Francis to be dispensed from the rights and obligations of the clerical state.
Hubbard’s successor as Bishop of Albany, Edward Scharfenberger, confirmed at the time that Hubbard had invalidly attempted marriage, and that there was no subsequent canonical resolution to the situation.
However, following Hubbard’s death in 2023, Scharfenberger granted Hubbard an ecclesiastical funeral at which he was the principal celebrant, despite canon law prohibiting ecclesiastical funerals for “manifest sinners” whose funeral might cause “public scandal to the faithful.”