stanley123:
Well, I don’t think so.
Here’s why:
Let’s suppose that you are correct and that only 5% of divorcing Catholics apply for an annulment. Now between 1984 and 1994, there were 440,174 ordinary process annulments granted by the American tribunals. Now you say that this constitutes only 5% of the divorcing Catholics. That means that 5% of divorcing Catholic couples amounts to a numerical value of 440,174. In such a case, if your statement were true (which I doubt), that would mean that from the period between 1984 and 1994, there were 8,803,480 Catholic couples applying for a divorce?
considering that approximately 50% of all marriages end in divorce - Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist or what have you, it is by no means out of line.
Again, you are ignoring the fact that with the change in the Canon laws concerning annulments, a goodly portion of those cases are not Catholics, but non-Catholics who wither want to marry a Catholic and get an annulment, or have laready married a Catholic in a second marriage, and are are getting an annulement in order to have their current marriage regularized.
Further, you are ignoring again the fact that on average about 25% of those cases are not about intent, but are about form.
What you can’t seem to see, or choose not to, is that those cases arose from divorces. you keep insisting, without any proof other than your own opinion, that annulments are causing the divorce on your basis of belief that the church is too easy in granting them, and that people “know” they are easily obtainable, and therefore they get a divorce because they “know” the church will "OK’ it.
You have failed to show any proof whatsoever that most people in the pew even understand what an annulment is, or how it is obtained, or on what grounds it is given, or even that they have an idea that it is “easy”. You simply hold to the assertion.
Further, you seem to have not talked with anyone who has actually applied for one, nor even seem aware of how many simply give up and quit - both the annulment process, which they see as too long and too rigorous, and the Church, which they feel won’t grant them one.
The problem with marriage today is not the annulment process. The problem(s) with marriage are numerous, but that is not one of them. The problems include the extreme permissiveness of society; the very high level of outright selfishness and materialism that society breeds into people; the failure of the Church to proclaim the Gospel vigorously (it calls for self-sacrifice, the one thing that marriage so demands if it is to survive); the failure of the Church for 30+ years to properly catechize about the truths of the Faith, including the Sacraments; the outright hedonism of society; the secularization of society where any religious thought or attitude is at best something of a very “personal” nature, certainly not to be imposed on others; the hypersexualization of society; the list goes on and on.
What you can’t seem to understand is that with the world, with our society, with our culture so infected by all of these that it is any wonder that anyone can confect the Sacrament of Matrimony. You rail that there are too many annulments.
There aren’t enough. Peoploe are leaving the Church in droves because they have been so caught up in the permissiveness of society, and have entered willy nilly into one of the deepest relationships a man or woman can have, only to find that they had no clue going in, and no intent to enter it permanently.
And the best you can offer is that they should then be condemend for making a poor choice for all the wrong reasons, as if that would give anyone else a clue that society is teaching them wrong.
