Is this really as good as it gets?
For some context, I'm a cradle Catholic and my family stopped going to church after my mom divorced my step dad and I didn't get confirmed until 3 years ago (28F now.) I got into all sorts of trouble when I was away from the church - drugs, ssa and transgender ideologies, fortune telling and new age witchcraft and even ended up with a giant tarot card tattoo. All very much repented of years before my confirmation. This obviously limits my dating pool as a Catholic, even if I am devout (which I am, I have a very serious prayer life and prefer daily mass when possible) and that is without going into the health issues that sometimes leave me stuck in bed or on the couch all day that are not going away anytime soon if they ever do. I go to all of the doctors and I am still dismissed and left with the most basic treatment that basically only allows me to sit upright on the couch and still need mobility aids to do normal activities even if I don't need them at mass yet.
My boyfriend (ex fiance? Fiance?) was a very cultural Catholic before he met me, and he hadn't been to confession in years when we met, but I didn't know that until we got into marriage prep (because he had always gone to confession and mass and had even come daily with me at times since meeting), which many people assumed to be solely due to my previous housing becoming dangerous for my health and having nowhere else to go but to stay with him (trust me, there is nothing short of filing a DV report and getting the cops involved in a bold faced lie to get any resources to move out even to a shelter let alone to get housing assistance, and I am not willing to do that to someone who helped me out of a bad situation and has never hit me. Also, I only followed Fr Ripperger's advice to not take a man seriously if he didn't propose within a year of dating, and he took me very seriously when I told him my prerogative and expectations.) We have been trying very hard to regularize our situation and were even asked to have our engagement called off by our priest a month before our wedding date (yes we were sleeping in separate houses during our engagement. We even offered to postpone because we weren't sure if him just sleeping at his parents was enough to meet the four month requirement, but we're not offered an alternative priest to continue with marriage prep.)
Neither of us know how to deal with this. I feel like a burden and like there is nothing I can do except give up my dogs and go to a homeless shelter to make the church happy with our living situation, and put myself in another dangerous living situation as I would never be approved for a rental where I live based on my SSDI check which is barely $1k a month (yes, I truly am unable to work to make even supplemental income and was even denied help doing so by the state agency that claims to help disabled people get jobs.)
The stress of everything - the engagement falling through, my health not improving, and the strain of finances being slim from having to cancel a honeymoon with no refund, pressure from his family to end the relationship, and the resulting confusion of whether we are supposed to be getting married at all has not helped us at all, let alone the stress of me being looked at either like I am using him or am some sort of modern concubine (we are chaste. But people have their assumptions one way or the other since I can't maintain my own housing and they don't care to hear otherwise.) It has come to a point where my ex fiance has put a knife in my hand and asked me to kill him, because he can't bring himself to evict me or kick me out like his family wants him to, and the church won't approve our marriage, and even when exploring other parishes in the area we were told to go back to the same parish that rejected us. We have been placed in a pressure cooker and no one wants to address the harm that has been done to us.
I don't think that even if I left this situation that I would be able to end up in any kind of relationship that would be any different. I don't have family to go home to. My options would be living on the street where I would be likely to be picked up for human trafficking (which yes, I've been trafficked before so this is not an exaggeration) or staying in this situation that the church has refused to bless. Our priest that called off our engagement is now deliberately avoiding us at Sunday mass and his homilies are now about how prayer means accepting suffering which to me paints a picture of him being very unwilling to change his mind, especially since in our marriage prep he asked me directly what I thought prayer was and I gave him the thomistic answer of it being the source of all good things from God. He even emphatically read the holy week readings at us and almost laughed as he emphasized "the man you are with now is not your husband but you have had five husbands" from the woman at the well reading and I had to really hold back tears because it was humiliating. He also implied that since my sacramental record is so different than most (different parishes and different years and my mother lying about who my father was and my last name on my sacramental records when I was a child) that I must be hiding another marriage. He also deliberately ignored items flagged on the foccus assessment that I wanted to address in favor of asking us to call off our engagement and not referring us to another priest and instead telling us that we would have to retake our foccus assessment which makes it feel extra pointed that he would not address my concerns.
I am heartbroken and I feel like there are no true remedies to my situation. They will not even speak to me about vocation and have ignored my requests to speak about even that. How am I supposed to regularize my situation if the church will not help? All I want is to be in a state of grace and free from venial sin again. We did everything we were told and it feels like we've been abandoned pastorally. We are both in catholic counseling individually and as a couple, but this was only used as a reason to call off our marriage due to mental health reasons (neither of us are impotent or incapable of consenting to the marriage, so I'm not sure if he really thought us having health issues one way or another was truly an impediment to marriage or not but canonically it is not.) This was also used as reason to deny him from joining the Knights of Columbus after they had hounded him to join for months and had already charged him a $700 deposit, which they did refund, however it has all been humiliating as a process. Our priest even specifically would request to schedule our marriage prep at the same time as the one ministry meeting we participated in at our parish which felt like actively discouraging us from participating in parish life together.
I love this man, he loves me, we have been through so much together and we have shared goals for the future that we both have been so excited for that include raising children in the faith and finally having our own family (which is incredibly meaningful for us as i have been estranged from my family and he was adopted as a baby), we follow the church's teachings to the best we are able to do and actively tried to avoid our living situation every way that we could, and it just feels as if we are being opposed from every side or treated as unreliable even with sacramental records.
We are bending over backwards to our detriment to try and please the church and our priests will hardly speak to us, and when simply attending daily mass at a parish with a better mass time for after my boyfriend gets off work and were told by one of the priests to make sure that we go to Sunday mass at our home parish, even though that mass time hardly ever works for us with my disability. I've tried calling the chancery, and they gave me the number for the tribunal, but again I have no idea if this is the correct process being that neither of us have ever been married before and all I know about the tribunal is it has something to do with annulments. What on earth are we supposed to do?