stanley123:
Perhaps you are right on this and that since Vatican II, catechesis, and some of the teachings of the Church went into the toilet. For example, the teaching on the indissolubility of marriage. However, in an attempt to pretend to save the teaching on the indissolubility of marriage, the Church theologians have come up with a way around it. Namely, they have introduced the practice of easy to obtain annulments.
“A spouse’s extramarital affair(s), trouble holding a job, financial irresponsibility, refusal to care for the home and/or children, dependence on parents, reliance on peer approval, alcohol or drug use, run ins with the law, etc. serve to demonstrate that the spouse exhibits an antisocial personality which would prevent him/her from fully understanding or carrying out the obligations of a lifelong relationship and therefore evidence that the spouse lacked the due competence required to form a sacramental marriage.”
"Many people believe that virtually any failed marriage can be annulled on the basis of incapacity and immaturity. It is not all that difficult to prove that someone was immature at the time of the marriage or did not fully understand all the obligations and developments involved in a lifelong marriage."
I think it was probably not the theologians so much as the Canon lawyers who had a hand in these changes.
At the very bottom of the disucssion is the issue of intent. although it is not the same issue, it certainly appears related to the issue of intent as in moral theology, as to mortal sins.
Some people in moral theology are such rigorists that the two issues (out of three) - intent and knowledge - are all but done away with. Some people are at the other end of the spectrum, so loose that for all practical purposes, no one ever commits a mortal sin. The truth is somewhere in between. As to the intent required in marriage, it is possible, as a rigorist, to insist that intent to commit to a permanent relationship can only be overcome by a showing that one (or both) of the parties publicly indicated clearly at the time of the marriage that they had no intent on a permanent marriage. That would be taking the issue of intent to an extreme, a position that I don;t beleieve either our last or current Pope would take.
It is also possible to go to the other extreme of finding no intent on what would best be described as a few mere foibles, as opposed to a real inability to form the necessary intent.
My impression is that it is being presumed, by the use of psychological evidence, that this will result in a majority of findings of no intent. Or, to put it another way, that the use of psychological evidence will end up in a majority of cases as a “weasel out” result.
To begin with, many cases are not issues of intent; they are of form, and so out of the 50,000+ cases, we need to weed all of those out.
After that, we have cases in which there is evidence, other than evidence of psychological inability to form the necessary intent, that the intent was not there; statements and activities (e.g. spousal violence, adultery, or both combined) would certainly go to show lack of intent.
That leaves cases where specific evidence is not available; and we rely on psychological evidence. And even there, there will be cases where the evidence can be overwhelming.
As I said, I have talked with both members of tribunals and those involved in the presentation of the case. In no circumstances have I found them to be “flim flam” in their attitudes toward marriage, or towards the cases they work on.
Can there be bad ones? Do we have any bozos for bishops? Of course there can be bad ones. But the issue really being discussed, at its heart, is whether or not psychoogical evidence is resulting in a large number of cases “sliding through”. I don’t find that the case. It is not my position that there are cases that “slide through”; because we are all human, there are bound to be some. Some because of a tribunal trying to be pastoral; some because the case was manipulated by the party bringing it, and the tribunal did not see that. but I really believe the number is way lower than is being presumed. It only takes a bad case to convince people far and wide that the whole system is rottne. And that, in large part, is because those reaching that conclusion have no other evidence than the bad case, and that only anecdotally.
Again, I go back to the changes that have occured in the last 30 to 35 years, both in society in general, and in the Catholic Church vis a vis the people in the pews, and I find way more evidence for lack of intnent there than in presuming a flim flam approach by the tribunals.
