Surprising annulment statistics!

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As has been noted there’s a little problem with the stats. There are married people today. Supposed NO ONE got married this year, yet SOME people got divorced. Would the divorce rate be infinite? No.

There are two somewhat related, but not perfectly correlated data bases being compared.
 
Pup7 said:
I’m no statistician, but isn’t that almost a 50% rate? If 6.9/1000 are marrying and 3.2/1000 are divorcing…
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Yes, but my point is that the divorce rate of 3.0 to 3.2 per year per 1000 population has not changed much from 1920.
 
The divorce rate according to the CDC for the US in 1920 was actually 8.0 per 1,000 (for married women over the age of 15).

Which to me highlights the errors others have mentioned. Who knows when those folks got married…

I can’t find a stat for 1920 in that document, but in 1930 it was 1.6 over all and in 1916 it was 1.1.
 
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You know, I really don’t understand the thrust of this post and its statistics. Divorce and annulment are two totally different things. If 800,000 get divorced and 60,000 get annulled, what’s anyone trying to “prove?”

And if the 800K figure is relatively constant, how does that figure in? There is no correlation between civil divorce and annulment as understood in the RCC.
 
Pup7 said:
So as I said, I still am struggling with only 12 of 4400 people being Catholic.

Where is the stat you quoted?
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One can be Catholic and get a legal annulment (one given by the state), but they still would have to get a Church annulment (one given by the Church). My guess is many more than 12 were Catholic, they just didn’t seek nor get Church annulments.
 
In 1971, Paul VI made some changes to the matrimonial nullity process (in Causas matrimoniales). Vatican II, itself, made no changes in this area. (There may have been some individual changes prior to that, made by Paul VI…I’d have to refresh my memory on the specifics…)

As for where I got my statement, the 1936 Instruction Provida Mater Ecclesia in articles 232ff, addressed judicial expenses, gratuitous legal assistance, and the reduction of judicial expenses. Individual judges had the ability to decide, on a case by case basis, whether or not the typical expenses (typical for that region) were appropriate or not.

Dan
 
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I didn’t mean to imply that the annulment process we have today came out of Vatican II, but is post Vatican II
As for where I got my statement, the 1936 Instruction Provida Mater Ecclesia in articles 232ff, addressed judicial expenses, gratuitous legal assistance, and the reduction of judicial expenses. Individual judges had the ability to decide, on a case by case basis, whether or not the typical expenses (typical for that region) were appropriate or not.
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But the fact remains that annulments can cost anywhere from $50 to over $1000 depending on the amount of research the tribunal must go through.

In the past, Pre-Vatican II, most people went to the parish priest in order to apply for an annulment. Many if not most, were turned down by the parish priest and never got their application sent into the diocesan tribunal.

Anyway, I don’t have a horse in this race so, I’m moving on.

Jim
 
AlNg said:
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Pup7:
I’m no statistician, but isn’t that almost a 50% rate? If 6.9/1000 are marrying and 3.2/1000 are divorcing…
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Yes, but my point is that the divorce rate of 3.0 to 3.2 per year per 1000 population has not changed much from 1920.
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Comparing stats like this is of little value.
  • There is no agreed on “divorce rate”
  • even if you look at raw divorces per 1000 population, who do you count? If you count the total population, keep in mind in the 1920s there were very few people over 65, and people over 65 rarely get divorced, either then or now. Today there are enormous numbers of people over 65.
This means the 2018 so called “divorce rate” is wildly underestimated if you are comparing stats with a century ago. The other problem is that looking at divorces per 1000 in 1925 is influenced by the number of or rate of marriages in the few decades previous. Did people marry in the same numbers, or at about the same ages, as people in the decades leading up to 2018?

Thus, you could figure many different “divorce rates” for any year, depending on how you count your data. So comparing across decades is of little value.
 
Given the strict requirements for who could apply for a declaration of nullity back in the old days (such as, you had to be Catholic or else you had to get special permission, you couldn’t have been the cause of the (alleged) invalidity, etc), and the relaxation of those requirements in the more recent past (70s-80s), it should not be surprising that there were tons more nullity cases in the 1970s and 1980s. Futher, given the way more people started to not only divorce but then marry “again”, it is not surprising that they would, eventually, want to see if they could regularize their status.

A significant portion of cases, to the present day, are presented by non-Catholics. And, the vast majority involve people who are in a subsequent, civil marriage. Someday, I might try to record some numbers and see what these percentages are.

Dan
 
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Pup7 said:
No wonder I get “wow!” when I tell folks I’ve been married 18 years.
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I think that’s worth a “congratulations” but not sure who’d be saying “wow”. The vast majority of couples I know have been married 10 or 20 years (and it’s their first marriage), and it seems pretty normal to me. They’re not all Catholics either and I’d say the majority of them aren’t religious and may even be agnostic or atheist.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
I think that’s worth a “congratulations” but not sure who’d be saying “wow”. The vast majority of couples I know have been married 10 or 20 years (and it’s their first marriage), and it seems pretty normal to me. They’re not all Catholics either and I’d say the majority of them aren’t religious and may even be agnostic or atheist.
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A lot of people. And not just military or one particular age group. We just had our 18th anniversary, which is the only reason I noticed it.

Most of the people I know my age (mid forties) aren’t on their first marriage. In and out of the military.
 
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acanonlawyer said:
Given the strict requirements for who could apply for a declaration of nullity back in the old days (such as, you had to be Catholic or else you had to get special permission, you couldn’t have been the cause of the (alleged) invalidity, etc),
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So in the case of mistaken gender, the one who faked being either a man or a woman couldn’t petition, it had to be the one who was fooled?
 
Just wondering if a man married 2x (not catholic ) marries for the third time, is 3rd wife and 2nd wife considered adulteresses?
 
Pup7 said:
Most of the people I know my age (mid forties) aren’t on their first marriage.
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I’ve found it a bit odd that I know so many long-marrieds, especially given that I haven’t exactly led a sedate, churchly life. And I do know some people who are on marriage number 2 or even 3, but they are the minority.

My impression is that some people, and I would include my husband and me in that group, are just very committed to each other regardless of whether they got married (whether you consider marriage as a “sacrament” or a “piece of paper” or what). I am pretty sure my husband and I would have stayed together marriage or no marriage. We had already been together 10 years when we got married (I always said that I would not marry anyone I hadn’t known for at least 10 years and that’s coincidentally just what happened) and then we stayed together 23 years on top of that until death did us part. I know it’s not “politically correct” for a Catholic to say this, but I always liked that Joni Mitchell “My Old Man” song.
Marriage to me was just God blessing the commitment we’d already made.

The couples I know who stay together for years have the same type of commitment.
To me, anybody getting married without that type of “mating for life” commitment would just be weird.
 
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Depends on whether the 3rd and 2nd wife were married before or not.

Adultery was technically, a woman having sexual relations with a man not her husband.

Jim
 
Each marriage would have to be considered separately. Such a person would need to submit a separate request for a declaration of nullity for EACH marriage.

Outside of glaringly obvious things you can prove “on paper” (e.g. lack of canonical form for a Catholic, previous marriage, being too young or too closely related), every marriage is presumed valid until proven otherwise. So the first marriage would be presumed valid and the second would be presumed invalid, UNTIL the first was found to be invalid, in which case the second MAY be considered valid until proven otherwise (depending on the grounds of the first case; for example, if there was a permanent impediment to marriage no future marriage would be valid).
 
Subtle reference to the US Supreme Court’s decision on gambling law?
 
The document you attached by the CDC contains statistics from all religions, not just Catholicism. We are only referring to Catholic annulments in this thread.
 
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