Why are there a much larger percentage of annulments petitioned for and granted in the USA compared to the rest of the Catholic world?

[Kindness]

I converted to Catholicism from atheism in 1988. I am from another nation and my husband is from the USA, we have been married 18 years.

I have since discovered that the church in the USA has the highest rate of annulments in the Catholic world. Could you please give an explanation for this? I know I cannot judge another couples marriage and it is good to grant mercy and forgiveness.

 

[Fr.Charles_Grondin]

Canon Lawyer Edward Peters addressed his in an article he wrote entitled:
Annulments in America: keeping bad news in contex.

You can read the full details from his article, but to summarize he notes:

…America functions. Much of the rest of the world does not.

American tribunals keep sufficient and reliable office hours, their telephones work, their mail is delivered on time, and if their photocopy machine breaks down, replacement parts are not six months away. Most of the parties and witnesses in an American nullity case will be able to drive to the tribunal in their own car on a paved road without hindrance by anything from fuel shortages to partisans in civil wars. In an almost incalculable and invisible number of ways, American Catholics have the leisure-in the classical sense of the word-to worry about their juridic status in the Church. Do we really expect a plethora of nullity cases to be processed from Catholics in communist China, Bosnia, or some third-world drug republic?
Well, one might rejoin, what about those countries where a Hobbesian hell does not hold sway? For the most part, such countries are either industrialized Pacific rim nations like Japan, with virtually no Catholic population, or they are a western European country like France or the Netherlands with what, in comparison to the U.S., can fairly be called a notably apathetic Catholic population.