SPLIT: Annulments have been too liberally granted in USA

[gus]

Annullments have been granted to liberally in the U.S
Granting sacremental divorce and remarriage is the first step in the trivalaztion of both sacraments. One reason i’m not big on reunion with the OC. I know its not the popular opinion.

 

[odile53]

Annullments have been granted to liberally in the U.S

Since tribunal findings are sealed, there’s no way we can know for sure if annulments have been granted “too liberally” in the United States. If we accept the proposition that a tribunal investigation presumes a valid marriage and the burden of proof lies on the petitioner to produce evidence that a sacramental bond never occurred, then it would seem to me that because of the sheer numbers of annulments granted, there are plenty of people who never should have attempted to get married in the first place.

I have several friends who are Catholic and divorced. I recall at the time of their marriages wondering if I should have hauled them off to a psychiatrist because there were so many red flags flying I thought I was in Tiennemen Square! A few years down the road, they ended up telling it to the judge. I’ve had a couple of heart-to-heart talks with a few of them, and told them that if they ever decided to go for an annulment I’d be glad to share my observations of the prospective marriage at the time if they thought it would be useful.

Any adult probably knows at least one friend or relative who embarked on a bad marriage, and it was all too painfully obvious that what they were watching that day in the church was the start of something that would be an absolute train wreck, and you could just see the train rolling down the tracks.

If premarital pastoral counseling were effective and washed out some of these ill-advised unions before they ever got to the altar, maybe we’re on to something there.

 

[Vico]

NCR:A Rome conference in late April [2012] hinted that the Vatican may be moving towards a more restrictive posture on annulments, the procedure in church law for declaring a marriage null and void, which some critics refer to as “Catholic divorce.”

…

Polish Bishop Antoni Stankiewicz, dean of the Roman Rota, the Vatican court that handles most marriage cases, told the conference that interpretation of canon 1095 must avoid an “anthropological pessimism” that would hold that “it’s almost impossible to get married, in view of the current cultural situation.”
“We must reaffirm the innate human capacity to marry,” Stankiewicz told the group.

ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/%E2%80%98loose-canon%E2%80%99-annulments-may-get-tighter

 

[TrueLight]

NCR:A Rome conference in late April [2012] hinted that the Vatican may be moving towards a more restrictive posture on annulments, the procedure in church law for declaring a marriage null and void, which some critics refer to as “Catholic divorce.”

…

Polish Bishop Antoni Stankiewicz, dean of the Roman Rota, the Vatican court that handles most marriage cases, told the conference that interpretation of canon 1095 must avoid an “anthropological pessimism” that would hold that “it’s almost impossible to get married, in view of the current cultural situation.”
“We must reaffirm the innate human capacity to marry,” Stankiewicz told the group.

ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/%E2%80%98loose-canon%E2%80%99-annulments-may-get-tighter

Great article. Especially these parts.

Over the centuries, church courts typically interpreted the capacity to consent fairly narrowly – as long as someone was of age, not coerced and not clearly insane, they were presumed to be capable. Yet as divorce has become more common, there’s often a powerful pastoral drive to find grounds for an annulment, given that a Catholic whose marriage breaks up can’t get remarried in the church without one, and if they remarry under civil law, they’re excluded from the sacraments.

Some critics argue that the pastoral desire to help people in difficulty has led to an overly elastic interpretation of canon 1095.

Sheila Rauch Kennedy, who successfully fought to overturn an annulment granted to her husband, then-U.S. Congressman Joseph Kennedy, in 1997, has written that church courts in America have adopted such an expansive reading of canon 1095 that it can now cover “almost anything … from personality traits such as self-centeredness, moodiness or being eager to please, to unproven ‘disorders’.”

Pope John Paul II, both in 1987 and 1988, and Pope Benedict XVI in 2009, issued similar calls for a stricter interpretation of church law in their annual addresses to the Roman Curia, and so far most observers believe those injunctions have not significantly changed the practice of church courts.

 

[Jean_Anthony]

aaa

 

[Phemie]

Sadly, couples often approach the Church for marriage once everything else is in place. Because they’ve often already spent thousands, they do their marriage preparation without once considering the possibility that what they learn might cause them to cancel or at least postpone the wedding. Regardless of what doubts may crop up they don’t want to lose the money.

I recall a priest telling us in a class, several years ago, that the Church was considering something along the lines of the RCIA process for couples wanting to get married. They would enter the Order of the Engaged and progress from there. Now, I don’t have any idea where his information came from, other than that he was a member of the N.A. Forum on the Catechumenate and he may well have had info that other people didn’t. I have heard nothing about this since. But wouldn’t it be a great idea, to have a parish accompany a couple wishing to marry in their journey from engagement to marriage?

I think couples should do a marriage preparation course to decide if they should get engaged, not once they’ve decided to get married, have announced it to everyone and don’t want to lose face by cancelling it.

I can only say that I’m happy that my son and his fiancée called it quits before they got to the altar. Not because I didn’t like her, because she is a sweet young woman, but because they were so obviously rushing into something for which neither one was ready.

 

[DCNBILL]

“The following article first appeared in 1996. Since then, it has been viewed both by its many supporters and by its few detractors as a defense of American tribunal practice. Actually, it is no such thing. My goal was simply to point out that criticisms of American tribunals based on their statistics, regardless of where such criticism arose, were open to rebuttal, for the simple reason that all statistical measurements of institutional activity need to be understood in a context. My article has clearly met that goal. As one highly orthodox and highly placed reader told me, “I read your piece with care, and am at last persuaded that the situation is not as catastrophic as I had feared.” Even those who are stridently opposed to my arguments found themselves contextualizing tribunal statistics in their arguments (not always persuasively, in my opinion, but at least in a way that conceded the need to appreciate the wider contexts in which annulment statistics are generated.) I count that as a small victory, as one step toward the truth that will set all men free.”

From this source

canonlaw.info/a_annulments.htm

 

[Godfollower]

Annullments have been granted to liberally in the U.S
Granting sacremental divorce and remarriage is the first step in the trivalaztion of both sacraments. One reason i’m not big on reunion with the OC. I know its not the popular opinion.

Are you saying that everyone (or almost everyone) who gets married in the Catholic Church in the U.S. is, in fact, capable of performing the Sacrament of Matrimony as the Catholic Church understands that Sacrament and does, in fact, intend to perform the Sacrament as the Catholic Church understands that Sacrament?

'Cause, as with all seven Sacraments, if the minister of the Sacrament – in this case, the bride and groom – does not intend to perform the Sacrament in accordance with Church teachings, then it isn’t a valid Sacrament.

If I act in a movie that includes a baptism scene, and there are 52 takes of the scene, and in every single take I intend only to play my role in the movie and not to perform the Sacrament of Baptism, then the baby in the movie is not baptised, even if I perform the rite correctly using actual holy water and repeating the proper Trinitarian formula. The same is true with Matrimony. If the minister in question does not intend to perform the Sacrament of Matrimony as taught by the Church, then it isn’t validly performed, even if everyone watching it thinks that it was.

God knows the human heart. We don’t.

 

[KCT]

Annullments have been granted to liberally in the U.S
Granting sacremental divorce and remarriage is the first step in the trivalaztion of both sacraments. One reason i’m not big on reunion with the OC. I know its not the popular opinion.

I think lack of good marriage prep could be the first step in trivializing marriage…

 

[odile53]

By no means do I intend to be flippant, but even in the civil arena, it’s far easier to get a marriage license than a driver’s license, and I think that some of what passes for marriage prep in some parishes and dioceses is almost laughably inadequate. And it’s painful to disagree, but people really don’t seem to have an innate capability to marry, if we are using that term to mean being able to establish a lifelong bond that is mutually edifying as well as providing a stable platform for the education of children. What people seem to have an innate capability to do is to try to find a person of the opposite gender to establish a longterm bond that they think will be personally satisfying. Society has become disordered in this matter, and the Church really needs to wake up to the fact that the world, the flesh and the devil are the primary influences in many people’s perception of what constitutes a marriage.

Obviously, the first school of marriage is the relationship between the parents that a child observes from day 1.

When my husband and I were engaged, we had to attend a pre-Cana conference, the primary focus of which was natural family planning and the Church’s teaching on artificial birth control. Now, while that was all very interesting and useful I’m sure to some couples, not every couple that gets married is in their twenties. We were in our early forties. As we found out over the next three years, fertility wasn’t going to be an issue.

It would have been more useful if one lecture (plus handouts) concentrated on the above, and a separate lecture concentrated on communication, finances, how to successfully blend two formed personalities, and the like. We’re still married, but some actual information (and perhaps some workshops) on dealing with such things would have spared us some misery. We would have already had the tools in our toolbox. As the old saying goes, “Forewarned is forearmed.”

I strongly suspect that most marriages fall apart because of lack of the ability to form a joint mission, poor communication skills, bad financial planning and discipline, and the like, because all of this is rarely discussed before the marriage occurs. Then two basically nice people who had good superficial intentions but were basically clueless about how to get all that to gel end up sitting across the breakfast table, angry, hurt, and looking for a way out.

As someone else pointed out, maybe what is too liberally granted is a marriage ceremony. Maybe prospective couples need to demonstrate that they really do have an understanding as to what the gritty reality of marriage entails before they say, “I do.”

The Church needs to start addressing the idea of readiness for marriage, and waiting till a pre-Cana conference is way too late. Catechesis on marriage (which is the vocation most people will find themselves called to,) needs to start way earlier than that, in the homes, and in parish educational programs. And it doesn’t seem to be happening.

By the way, I think that early catechesis for marriage would be a great ministry for the permanent diaconate. These men, more often than not, are married, and have a lot of credibility in terms of “been there, done that,” because of their own experience, and getting their wives involved jointly in some early high school education programs would be a good head start that the Church can give teenagers.

We immunize kids against communicable biologic diseases. Maybe we need to immunize them against the communicable social disease of divorce.