sufaud wrote:
Vatican Alters Guidance on Annulments
Update Follows Warnings About Threats to Marriage
By Daniel Williams and Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 9, 2005; Page A16
Photo:
http://tinyurl.com/6fun3
Caption:
Cardinal Julian Herranz, speaking at the Vatican, said annulment
cases "can
be easily misunderstood."
Photo Credit: Max Rossi -- Reuters
ROME, Feb. 8 -- The Vatican issued revised and slightly streamlined
procedures Tuesday for Roman Catholics to annul marriages but urged
church
tribunals to apply the rules more stringently. Church officials said
an
increase in annulments reflected a contemporary mentality of easy
divorce
that threatens the institution of marriage.
The revisions do not change the limited justifications for annulment,
which
is a ruling by a church tribunal that a marriage never existed.
Although
some procedures have been slightly liberalized, Vatican officials
said the
rules are mainly designed to make it easier to determine whether an
annulment should be granted.
Vatican officials said that annulment procedures must not, even in
appearance, contribute to matrimony's decline. "In the context of a
divorce
mentality, even canon annulment cases can be easily misunderstood, as
if
they were nothing more than ways to obtain a divorce with the
blessing of
the church," Cardinal Julian Herranz, who heads the Vatican's
Pontifical
Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts, told reporters.
Pope John Paul II and other church leaders have repeatedly cited
civil
divorce, hedonism, artificial insemination and demands by gay men and
lesbians for marriage rights as threats to traditional marriage.
The Catholic Church prohibits divorce -- the dissolution of a valid
marriage
-- but permits annulment in special cases. Grounds include evidence
that one
or both of the partners lacked the mental capacity to marry, hid
information
on infertility, impotence or a previous marriage, or married under
threat.
Titled "Dignity of Marriage," the 111-page guide is the work of
Vatican
courts and departments concerned with defending church dogma. It took
10
years to compile. The guidelines update a compendium issued in 1936
and are
based on the church's 1983 code of canon law.
The U.S. church generates by far the biggest share of annulment
requests.
Many are filed because people who have obtained civil divorces want
to
remarry in the Catholic Church, an act prohibited by the church
unless the
earlier marriage is voided. Divorced people are also prohibited from
taking
communion.
Vatican officials estimate that in 2002, the most recent year for
which
statistics are available, about 70 percent of all annulment requests
were
made in the United States. Worldwide, more than 56,000 Catholics
requested
annulments; 46,000 were granted. "Requests have jumped enormously in
the
last decades," said Bishop Velasio De Paolis, a Vatican court
official. As
recently as 1968, fewer than 350 annulments were granted in the
United
States.
Eleven days ago, in a speech to the Roman Rota, the Vatican's appeals
court,
John Paul launched a salvo against the easy granting of annulments.
Marital
problems are not enough to declare that a marriage never happened, he
said.
"In the name of alleged pastoral needs, voices have been raised to
propose
that unions that have totally failed be declared invalid," the
pontiff said.
"Individual or collective interests can induce the parties to take
recourse
to forms of falsehood and even corruption."
Last fall, Joaquin Llobel, an instructor in church law at Rome's
Pontifical
University of the Holy Cross, told Vatican Radio that the treatment
of
annulment requests was wildly uneven around the world. "Some poor
countries
in Latin America, Africa and Asia do not even have ecclesiastical
courts" to
consider the requests, he said. In other countries, he said,
established
tribunals "equate failure of marriage with its nullity."
A rule in the new document makes an annulment slightly easier to
obtain by
allowing a church appeals court to uphold an annulment grant by a
lower
court even if the appeals court's conclusion differs slightly from
the
original tribunal's on why the marriage should be voided. On the
other hand,
the new rules still require an appeals court to rule even if all
parties and
the initial tribunal agree that an annulment is permissible.
The document disappointed some American Catholics who had hoped that
the
Vatican would dramatically tighten the rules. "In America we are
swamped by
a culture that treats marriage very lightly," said Charles Molineaux
of
McLean, who belongs to a lay group devoted to defending church
orthodoxy.
"The church is supposed to be confronting the culture, not floating
with
it."
The document also disappointed people who had hoped for procedures
that
would encourage truthfulness and promote healing after a marriage is
annulled. Pierre Hegy, a professor of sociology at Adelphi University
in New
York, said the current rules result in deception, including
self-deception
by formerly married couples.
Among American Catholics, one of the most frequently invoked grounds
for an
annulment is "psychic incompetence," meaning that one or both of the
spouses
did not fully understand the meaning of marriage at the time of their
wedding.
Hegy said he has spoken to many American Catholics who say they
understood
the meaning of marriage but felt compelled to lie when they went
before a
tribunal. Getting an annulment "can be a very healing procedure for
some
people," Hegy said. "But it is not for most."
Michael G. Lawler, professor of theology at Creighton University, a
Jesuit
school in Omaha, said the U.S. Catholic hierarchy has been operating
for
more than a decade under "experimental" rules that allow annulments
for
psychic incompetence or immaturity. Those rules are not widely
accepted in
other countries.
Almost every U.S. diocese has established tribunals with canon
lawyers to
consider annulments, he said. The U.S. waiting period is typically 10
to 14
months. In Europe, where relatively few dioceses have such tribunals,
waits
of several years are common.
Cooperman reported from Washington.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9165-2005Feb8.html
