T
Timidity
Guest
This is a very long story (three “next page” clicks!) from The Walrus that talks about annulments, the process, and people who fight them. It’s hard to distill such a long article down to three paragraphs, but I’ll try:Given the eagerness with which Catholic officials tried to expedite the annulment of her thirty-five-year marriage, Pat MacLeod believes the Church has no credibility in portraying itself as a champion of traditional marriage. “Absolutely not,” the feisty, sixty-seven-year-old Ottawa grandmother snaps. “What do they know about heterosexual marriage?” In choosing to criticize the process, which she describes as “emotional rape,” MacLeod is something of a pioneer. Annulments are usually granted only after couples legally divorce, and it’s hard to find Catholics such as MacLeod who are willing to discuss their experience. They are often sworn to secrecy and find it embarrassing to discuss the grounds, usually psychological, on which annulments are granted.
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Certainly MacLeod’s experience suggests tribunals haven’t adopted a stricter interpretation of “defective consent.” At a loss to understand how her consent was defective, MacLeod demanded to see her ex-husband’s petition. She was insulted by his claim that neither she nor he was capable of forming the proper consent because both came from dysfunctional families. The petition even maligned the reputations of dead relatives, a particularly low blow to MacLeod, who insists she comes from “a very happy, loving family.” Even worse, she was being cast as someone who’d been “swinging from the trees” when she wed. “That really hurt. It’s demeaning for people to try to tell you that you didn’t know what you were doing when you got married.”
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In a July 2002 letter to the presiding judicial vicar, the professor [her “canon lawyer”] laid out a raft of injustices and “serious violations” of canon law in MacLeod’s case. One month later, she received a curt note informing her that her ex-husband had abruptly withdrawn his petition. MacLeod believes it would have sailed through had she not finally retained the canon law expert, whose protests authorities couldn’t ignore.
Those excerpts are about the main person followed for the story, but there are others in there, too. The overall editorial voice seems to be that annulments are handed out too easily in North America. There also seems to be an underlying bias in favor of modernizing the Church in favor of gay marriage and divorce, but it’s far more balanced than most mainstream media articles I’ve read. A worthy read, IMHO.
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Certainly MacLeod’s experience suggests tribunals haven’t adopted a stricter interpretation of “defective consent.” At a loss to understand how her consent was defective, MacLeod demanded to see her ex-husband’s petition. She was insulted by his claim that neither she nor he was capable of forming the proper consent because both came from dysfunctional families. The petition even maligned the reputations of dead relatives, a particularly low blow to MacLeod, who insists she comes from “a very happy, loving family.” Even worse, she was being cast as someone who’d been “swinging from the trees” when she wed. “That really hurt. It’s demeaning for people to try to tell you that you didn’t know what you were doing when you got married.”
…
In a July 2002 letter to the presiding judicial vicar, the professor [her “canon lawyer”] laid out a raft of injustices and “serious violations” of canon law in MacLeod’s case. One month later, she received a curt note informing her that her ex-husband had abruptly withdrawn his petition. MacLeod believes it would have sailed through had she not finally retained the canon law expert, whose protests authorities couldn’t ignore.
Those excerpts are about the main person followed for the story, but there are others in there, too. The overall editorial voice seems to be that annulments are handed out too easily in North America. There also seems to be an underlying bias in favor of modernizing the Church in favor of gay marriage and divorce, but it’s far more balanced than most mainstream media articles I’ve read. A worthy read, IMHO.