Annulments: Separating fact from fiction

From Our Sunday Visitor

Annulment is one of those Catholic realities shrouded in myths and misunderstandings, exaggerated fallacies and genuine confusion. To top it off, this critical process, which allows divorced Catholics to seek healing and the possibility of remarrying in the Church one day, still carries a bit of a stigma. How many people do you know with annulments? Probably more than you realize.

We went through the annulment process years ago, both through the Metropolitan Tribunal of the Archdiocese of New York. Although the experience varied for each of us, the end result was the same: Receiving the declaration of nullity was a moment of healing, closure, grace.

Unfortunately, it’s something that many divorced Catholics miss out on because they are intimidated by the process or have received bad information — and there’s plenty of it floating around out there — about what an annulment is and how the process works.

So, we thought we’d take you through that process step by step and take some of the mystery out of it.

Read entire article here

Clearing up annulment myths and misconceptions

From osvdailytake.com

When it comes to annulment, there's a lot of bad information out there. How can we tell the facts from the fiction? This week, in the latest In Focus section of Our Sunday Visitor, my husband, Dennis, join forces to tackle the often-confusing subject of annulment. We walk you through the process, debunk the ten most common myths, and offer a personal reflection on this process that can bring people closure and healing.

I'll get you started on the main story here:

By Dennis Poust and Mary DeTurris Poust

Annulment is one of those Catholic realities shrouded in myths and misunderstandings, exaggerated fallacies and genuine confusion. To top it off, this critical process, which allows divorced Catholics to seek healing and the possibility of remarrying in the Church one day, still carries a bit of a stigma. How many people do you know with annulments? Probably more than you realize.

We went through the annulment process years ago, both through the Metropolitan Tribunal of the Archdiocese of New York. Although the experience varied for each of us, the end result was the same: Receiving the declaration of nullity was a moment of healing, closure, grace.

Unfortunately, it’s something that many divorced Catholics miss out on because they are intimidated by the process or have received bad information — and there’s plenty of it floating around out there — about what an annulment is and how the process works.
So, we thought we’d take you through that process step by step and take some of the mystery out of it...Continue reading HERE.

For the Top 10 Annulment Myths, click HERE. To read my personal reflection on the process, click HERE.

US has 6% of world's Catholics and 60% of the world's annulments

From The Catholic World Report

Apart from the papacy, few doctrines divide the Catholic Church from non-Catholic ecclesial communities as does the doctrine of the indissolubility of a consummated Christian marriage. Eastern Orthodox Christians are permitted three marriages; King Henry VIII’s desire to remarry helped lead to the formation of the Anglican Communion. Martin Luther permitted divorce in the cases of adultery, desertion, failure to fulfill conjugal duties, and “where husband and wife cannot get along together.”

The Catholic Church holds that the teaching of Jesus Christ is clear: husband and wife “are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.… Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery” (Mark 10:8-12).

Thus, in 1563, the Council of Trent decreed that if anyone shall say that the Church has erred in having taught, and in teaching that, according to the teaching of the Gospel and the Apostles, the bond of matrimony cannot be dissolved, and that neither party—not even the innocent, who has given no cause by adultery—can contract another marriage while the other lives, and that he, or she, commits adultery who puts away an adulterous wife, or husband, and marries another; let him be anathema.

In our own time, Pope John Paul II taught that “it is a fundamental duty of the Church to reaffirm strongly…the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage” (Familiaris Consortio, 1981). He affirmed the discipline of “not admitting to Eucharistic Communion divorced persons who have remarried,” adding that reconciliation in the sacrament of penance, which would open the way to the Eucharist, can only be granted to those who, repenting of having broken the sign of the covenant and of fidelity to Christ, are sincerely ready to undertake a way of life that is no longer in contradiction to the indissolubility of marriage. This means, in practice, that when, for serious reasons, such as for example the children’s upbringing, a man and a woman cannot satisfy the obligation to separate, they take on themselves the duty to live in complete continence, that is, by abstinence from the acts proper to married couples.

While most New Testament passages on marriage make no exception for divorce, our Lord says in St. Matthew’s Gospel that “whoever divorces his wife, except for porneia (unchastity), and marries another, commits adultery.” Catholic exegetes have debated the meaning of porneia for centuries, with the Navarre Bible explaining that “it is almost certain that the phrase refers to unions accepted as marriage among some pagan peoples, but prohibited as incestuous in the Mosaic Law and in rabbinical tradition. The reference, then, is to unions radically invalid because of some impediment.… They had never in fact been joined in true marriage.”

This explanation speaks to the development of the annulment, the declaration by Church authorities that a putative marriage never truly existed because of reasons such as consanguinity or lack of consent. In the West, popes and bishops were declaring marriages invalid in the early Middle Ages, with Pope St. Gregory VII beginning to systematize ecclesiastical court procedures in the 11th century.

Over the centuries, the Church’s discipline in this matter changed several times. In 1741, Pope Benedict XIV, concerned about the ease with which annulments were granted in his day, mandated that the declaration of nullity be appealed to another court, and created the office of the defender of the bond, whose function in ecclesiastical trials is to argue for the validity of the disputed marriage.

In 1970, the bishops of the United States obtained permission from the Holy See to modify canonical procedures in the adjudication of marriage cases. One judge, and not three, could render a decision, and cases could be heard in the diocese of the person seeking the annulment; in addition, appeal of a declaration of nullity to another court became discretionary rather than obligatory. The latter provision lapsed with the promulgation of the new Code of Canon Law in 1983, which expanded the grounds of invalid consent: “they are incapable of contracting marriage…who are not capable of assuming the essential obligations of matrimony due to causes of a psychic nature” (canon 1095).

Partly for these reasons, the number of annulments granted annually in the United States soared from 338 in 1968, to 28,918 in 1974, to a peak of 63,933 in 1991. By 2004 the number had fallen to 46,330, and it fell even further, to 35,009, in 2007—a remarkable decline of 24 percent in three years.

Despite this decline, the United States, with 5.9 percent of the world’s Catholics, still accounts for 60 percent of the Church’s 58,322 declarations of nullity (2007 statistics in the Vatican Secretariat of State’s Statistical Yearbook of the Church). Of the 35,009 declarations of nullity granted in the US, 79 percent were granted through the ordinary process, while 21 percent were granted through the documentary process.

The documentary (administrative) process is used for relatively black-and-white cases, such as those involving defect of form (which occurs when a Catholic is married outside the Church), consanguinity, marriage below the legal age, marriage to a person validly married to another, marriage (under certain circumstances) to one’s abductor or the murderer of one’s spouse, or marriage to clerics or religious not dispensed from their vows. Of the 7,355 declarations of nullity granted in the US by the documentary process, 74 percent were granted for reasons of defect of form.

The ordinary process, on the other hand, entails a trial that determines whether a valid marriage took place. Questions over the validity of consent and over perpetual and antecedent impotence are adjudicated in the ordinary process. On occasion, disputes over defect of form and other impediments to marriage are dealt with in the ordinary process. Of the 27,654 declarations of nullity granted in the US by the ordinary process, 99.6 percent were granted for reasons of defect of consent—the most oft-criticized grounds for annulment.

In the US, 6 percent of ordinary-process cases are renounced by those seeking an annulment, while an additional 6 percent are abated because the parties failed to follow through with the procedural acts necessary for a trial to take place. Of the remaining 88 percent of cases in which sentences are given, 96 percent of sentences are in favor of nullity.

Sentences in favor of nullity are automatically appealed to a court of second instance in another diocese. One percent of these cases are renounced or abated, 69 percent are confirmed by decree, and 30 percent proceed to an additional trial. In this final category, 98 percent are eventually ruled null.

The United States leads the world in declarations of nullity (with 35,009 in 2007) by a very large margin; the country with the next highest annulment rate—Italy—had only 2,625 that same year. Brazil, Poland, Canada, Mexico, Spain, India, South Korea, Germany, Australia, Colombia, France, Ukraine, and Great Britain round out the world’s top 15 nations for annulments. These 15 countries account for 91 percent of declarations of nullity. On the other hand, Africa, which has 14 percent of the world’s Catholics, accounts for a mere 0.9 percent of the Church’s declarations of nullity.

An analysis of international annulment statistics reveals some similarities and some differences between the United States and the rest of the world. Of the 23,313 declarations of nullity granted outside the United States, 94 percent were granted through the ordinary process, while only 6 percent were granted through the documentary process; in the latter category, 57 percent were granted for reasons of defect of form. Since the United States accounts for 87 percent of annulments worldwide granted for defect of form, the US has a relatively high percentage of Catholics who took part in a civil marriage outside the Church and who now wish to get married within the Church.

Of the 21,879 declarations of nullity granted outside the United States by the ordinary process, 98.2 percent were granted for reasons of defect of consent. However, in 140 nations and territories, there was not a single declaration of nullity for reasons of defect of consent in 2007. Thirty-nine of these nations and territories are in Africa, 32 are in Asia, and 17 are in Europe. An additional 37 nations worldwide granted between one and a dozen declarations of nullity on defect-of-consent grounds.

There is a deep chasm between the United States and the rest of the world in the quantity of annulments granted; there is a similarly deep chasm between those nations that are relatively willing to grant annulments for reasons of defect of consent and those that are not. Twenty-eight nations grant more than 100 defect-of-consent annulments each year. From 2005 to 2007, the nations and territories with the highest ratio of defect-of-consent annulments to Catholics were Denmark, the United States, the Cook Islands, Norway, Japan, Tonga, South Korea, Thailand, Lebanon, Sweden, Samoa, and Finland.

Outside the US, 9.5 percent of first-instance ordinary process cases are renounced by those seeking an annulment, while an additional 7.5 percent are abated because the parties failed to follow through with the necessary procedural acts. Of the remaining 83 percent of cases in which sentences are given, 89.8 percent of sentences are granted in favor of nullity—a bit lower, but not much, than the 96 percent rate in the US.

Of all the nations of the world in which such trials take place, only in Burkina Faso, Eritrea, Malawi, Uganda, and Vietnam do 50 percent or more of cases result in rulings against nullity. Most of the world’s nations with high numbers of annulments decide 93-97 percent of sentences in favor of nullity, with Canada (at 99.5 percent) and Australia (at 98 percent) having particularly high affirmative sentence rates and Germany (at 82 percent) and Poland (at 79.5 percent) relatively low ones.

Outside the United States, almost 3 percent of second-instance cases are renounced or abated, 69.5 percent are confirmed by decree, and nearly 28 percent proceed to an additional trial, at which 87 percent of sentences are in favor of nullity. This rate is lower than the United States’ 98 percent rate, largely because of statistics from Europe, where only 65 percent of second-instance trials end with a sentence in favor of nullity.

Why the disparity?

Continue to read the entire article...

Here's the math: Fewer weddings in Church = fewer annulments

from wsj.com

Every year, Pope Benedict XVI gives a speech to the judges of the Roman Rota, a Vatican court that mainly handles marriage cases. He usually includes a warning about handing out annulments too easily, and Americans invariably assume that he's talking about them. On this matter they may have a point: Vatican statistics say that more than 60% of annulments come from the United States.

Official Catholic teaching holds that marriage is for life, and hence divorce is not tolerated. Yet church law provides for an "annulment," meaning a formal declaration that a marriage never existed, usually on the grounds that at least one of the parties lacked the capacity to give true consent. To secure an annulment, Catholics have to turn to church courts, which can be time-consuming and expensive.

Annulment has drawn a variety of criticisms over the years. Secularists tend to sniff at the whole idea, deriding it as "Catholic divorce," a way for the church to have its cake and eat it too—claiming to uphold marriage, but providing a way out for people willing to jump through some ecclesiastical hoops.

Theologians and canon lawyers bristle at those arguments, claiming that the church believes in the sanctity of marriage so strongly that it insists that all conditions have to be in place for a real marriage to exist.

Critics have long asserted that annulments favor the rich and powerful. In the Middle Ages, it was notoriously easier for kings and princes to secure annulments than for common folk. (What made the case of England's Henry VIII remarkable is precisely that a pope actually said "no.")

That charge surfaced prominently in the U.S. in 1997, when Sheila Rauch Kennedy wrote that her ex-husband, then-Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II, had their marriage of 12 years annulled without even informing her. Ms. Rauch charged that the Kennedy clan's influence explained the outcome, which she opposed: An annulment meant her marriage had been a sham, she argued, but that was a lie. As it turns out, she had the last laugh. Her appeal to the Vatican was upheld in 2005, meaning that in the eyes of the Catholic Church, she and Mr. Kennedy remain married.

The charge of bias for the rich is now hard to sustain, at least in the U.S. According to the Canon Law Society of America, in 2009 annulment procedures cost $31 million, but only $4.9 million of that came in fees collected from the parties. The balance, some $26.1 million, was kicked in by the dioceses themselves, precisely to ensure that people struggling to make ends meet can still use the system.

These days, the most common criticism comes from conservative circles within the church, and it's usually directed at the U.S.: America, they charge, is an annulment factory that undercuts church teaching on marriage. That's probably the background to Benedict's recent speech, in which he asserted that no one has a "right" to marriage. He called for pastors to do a better job preparing people to marry, so there would be less demand for annulments. In light of these papal warnings, church courts have become a bit more rigorous, and parishes are more careful about remarrying people who have had annulments—not wanting them to make a habit of it.

Yet America's annulment practice has its defenders. More annulments are granted here, they argue, because church courts make sure the process is open to everyone, that it functions smoothly, and that people know their rights. Don't blame us, they say, because we're good at what we do. As one American canon lawyer testily wrote a decade ago: "Americans make up six percent of the world's population, but they account for 100 percent of the men on the moon. So what? America functions. Much of the rest of the world does not."

In truth, things are already trending the way Benedict seems to want, though not necessarily for reasons likely to give him cheer. Since 2006, according to the Canon Law Society of America, both the number of cases filed and the number of annulments granted have been gradually declining. That may be partly because courts have become tougher. But it's probably more related to the fact that fewer Catholics are getting married in the church, and fewer of those who are bother to seek an annulment if their marriage breaks down.

For Benedict XVI, in other words, this may be a classic case of "Be careful what you wish for."