I am pessimistic about the future of these reforms. If I understand the new rules correctly, pervasive abuses are almost a guarantee.
The purpose of annulment procedures is to allow faithful Catholics to get a sound judgment from the Church about the validity of their marriages. If Catholics cannot expect the Church to truly arrive at moral certainty that their marriages are invalid before declaring them so, then the annulment process is worthless. In fact, itâs worse than worthless, itâs actively harmful, because it misleads Catholics into contracting new âmarriagesâ which are not actually marriages, but rather materially adulterous relationships with no attendant sacramental graces.
If the annulment process is not trustworthy, it doesnât matter how streamlined it is, or how inexpensive it is, or how âmercifulâ it is, or how much people like it. It is useless.
So will faithful Catholics still be able to trust their local judges and bishops to genuinely reach moral certainty before declaring a marriage invalid? Frankly, no, I donât think they will.
In the
five cardinals book, Cardinal Burke explains at length how the lack of a double conforming sentence requirement prior to issuance of the 1983 Code of Canon Law led to ubiquitous abuses of the annulment process. Marriages were regularly declared null with almost no review or contestation, by judges and tribunals who saw their role as being âmercifulâ and giving people a second chance, not rendering an accurate judgment about the initial validity of the bond. It is from this period that annulments got their reputation as âCatholic divorces.â Luckily the 1983 Code of Canon Law fixed most of these abuses, specifically by reinstating the double conforming sentence.
But these new reforms eliminate the double conforming sentence. So juridically we are right back where we were in the 70s, when abuses of the annulment process were the norm.
Thatâs not all, though. Eliminating the double conforming sentence is only one of the lesser changes these new reforms implement. The biggest change is the introduction of a streamlined process intended to take less than two months. So which annulment cases get to make use of this streamlined process? Jimmy Akin has provided a
translation of the requirements:
7) In what kind of situations can the new, shorter process be used?
According to the procedural norms attached to Mitis Iudex Dominus Iesus (see Art. 14 § 1), these cases include the following:
lack of faith resulting in the simulation of consent to be married or an error that determines the will regarding one of the requirements of marriage
the brevity of married life (i.e., the couple divorced very quickly after being married)
procured abortion to prevent procreation (presumably during the marriage itself, prior to bearing other children and thus showing an unwillingness to procreate)
the stubborn persistence in a extramarital affair at the time of the wedding or at a time immediately following
the malicious concealment of:
- infertility
- a serious contagious disease
- children born from a previous relationship
- an incarceration
a reason for getting married that is completely foreign to married life (presumably something like entering a legal fiction of a marriage to be able to immigrate or gain an inheritance) or consisting of the unplanned pregnancy of the woman
the physical violence inflicted to extort the consent to marry
the lack of use of reason proved by medical documents
Now I have little knowledge of canon law, but that looks like an extremely broad list. Note especially âlack of faith resulting in⌠an error that determines the will regarding one of the requirements of marriage.â That sounds broad enough to be almost anything. So a huge number of annulment cases can be legally shunted to this streamlined process. Note also that itâs very common in annulment cases for important information to come to light only in the thick of the formal annulment process, information that presumably will never come to light in this streamlined process.
And all of
that even assumes that dioceses and judges around the world will not stretch the rules for which cases can be decided using the streamlined process. But of course they will. Before 1983, most annulment cases were actually supposed to have that second appeal review, and dispensations from the review were supposed to be granted only in cases where nullity was extremely clear. But instead the appeal was dispensed with in
virtually every case, and no request to dispense with the appeal was
ever denied. The exact same thing is going to happens now, only not just with the double conforming sentence, but the whole formal annulment process.
The only check provided against this kind of abuse is the direct involvement of the local bishop. But this is hardly any check at all, as bishops are incredibly busy and will probably do little more than rubber stamp all these streamlined annulments.
Besides, can you imagine a
Cardinal Marx, or
Cardinal Danneels, or even the average bishop in the United States clamping down on overuse of the streamlined process? Of course not. Doing so would lead to serious bad press (how can they be so legalistic and unmerciful!?), and would almost certainly have little support from Rome.
