A whole generation of US citizens has grown up not having a clue of what marriage is. They were raised as the product of the no-fault divorce laws and saw their own parents marry multiple times. They don’t even know what constitutes marriage. Add to that the culture’s pervasive sinful view of sex and divorce. Throw in a refusal to teach the truth of Christ from the pulpit, and you have many thousands of young couples every year marrying in wrong churches, or by judges (those are some of the annulments you’re talking about… they weren’t even marriages attempted under the proper jurisdiction of the church and church law, and are invalid) and others who go through the motions and intend to avoid children, permanency and exclusivity. The things you need to make a marriage valid.
Granting these annulments is peculiar to American Catholics because about 25 percent of them still go to church. European Catholics often just stay married and have mistresses and affairs (Like French President Mitterand) and they don’t go to church at all (3 percent church attendance in some of those countries!. The fact so many Americans want annulments is because we’ve got probably 60 million Catholics in our country (someone correct me if my number is off) and if half of marriages end in divorce, and a small portion of those actually try for annulments, it’s still a larger group than in other European countries.
Maybe Catholics overseas are content to not apply at all and just remarry and receive communion anyway. We don’t know.
Consider it this way: Say a US car manufacturer made millions of cars every year, but the standards they used to let those cars out of the factory were so low that half those cars fell apart in 5 years. When those car owners sought redress for that problem, and asked for a chance to buy another car, would you tell them, “No, drive the broken car.” By what standard do you compare that to European nations? We’re talking about a dying Europe, by the way, where there are more coffins than cradles (except for the growing Muslim population that does not file for annulments with Rome). And some of those countries have more restrictive divorce laws than we do, which skews the whole attitude of couples going into marriage to begin with. It plants a bad crop that we reap later. There were less annulments in the USA when divorce was not something one party could do to another on a whim and without valid reason. Our laws now favor the party who wants out, which leaves a lot of people like me who went into a marriage wanting it to be forever victimized and wanting the hope of not having to live the rest of their life alone because the other party lied on the altar. The people who take marriage seriously apply for annulments. The rest just remarry and do what they want. But because our population is larger and the US is more religious overall than many other nations, our numbers are larger. To me, that is the sign of a healthy church and people who are trying to actively live God’s law.
Our problem is not too many annulments. It’s too many bad marriages being allowed in the first place. Imagine, though, the outcry if American priests started refusing to marry couples if they saw all the warning signs and saw the couple had no intent to live a Catholic life. The press would be all over that! The outrage!
