Marriage Annulments at Record Highs

A report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media.  This week’s item is from the Detroit Free Press, with a headline, “Detroit Archdiocese sets a record handling marriage annulments.”Detroit holds an unusual world record.The Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit surpasses dioceses around the world in handling annulments, a confusing and controversial process that allows Catholics to remarry in the church.Detroit’s record is due mainly to Cardinal Edmund Szoka, Detroit’s Archbishop in 1982.Szoka quietly streamlined the local annulment process and abolished the $300 processing fee.New York and Chicago for example, charge $800, although dioceses often reduce or waive the fees for those who can’t afford them.For years, US Catholic leaders have been secretive about the rate of annulments fearing criticism from the Vatican.A small but growing number of dioceses such as Detroit and Saginaw have improved the process to reach out to divorced Catholics and keep them in the pews. Most other Christian faiths recognize civil divorce allowing remarriage in church ceremonies.In many national surveys, the majority of Catholics have said they want their church to recognize civil divorce.The Vatican opposes this idea.The result is a confusing concept to most Catholics, let alone non-Catholics.Why does the Vatican insist that civil divorce does not end a marriage and how can a church deem a marriage annulled when a couple was together for 20+ years and reared six children?Six years ago, Vatican Canon Law expert, Archbishop Vincenzo Fagiolo blasted American bishops for extraordinary increases in annulments.Fagiolo called it a “grave scandal.”There are two kinds of annulments: some are automatically granted so-called lack of form annulments which apply to divorced Catholics who were married by judges, mayors, or non-Catholic clergy.More complicated and intimidating is the formal annulment required of the Catholic married in the church who is now divorced and wishes to remarry in a Catholic ceremony.“A declaration of nullity is not going back and saying the marriage never happened,” explained the tribunal’s Reverend George Miller.“It’s a statement in hindsight that an essential element was lacking when the marriage took place.”What are some essential elements?Maturity, emotional health, a commitment to fidelity, to bear children, a past free of verbal, emotional, or physical abuse.The marriage can be declared null if one partner did not intend to have children, or expected to have sex outside marriage, or even figured divorce could be an easy way out if problems developed.

Tom:

Dave as you know, I am a former Roman Catholic and as I look back on the faith that I had, more and more it seems to me that it’s really a legalistic system made up by men.I have a book in my office that’s called the Code of Canon Law.There are 1750 rules and regulations and many of them, if you do not follow, it is a mortal sin, and if you die without confessing that sin, you spend eternity in hell.Now it isn’t just that this is law here, man law, but it’s nothing a God would do.The God of the Bible especially.

Dave:

Well, it’s irrational first of all.I mean I remember receiving a letter from a dear Catholic lady—why she wrote to me, I don’t know.She had been married 30 years and they had five children and now her husband was getting an annulment.He had divorced her and was then getting an annulment from the church.I mean you are going to say that a 30 year marriage with five children never happened?It didn’t occur.Why is this?It is divorce under another name is what it is, just the facts about it.But it is a bending of rules, of morality, of rational common sense—

Tom:

They have a law against divorce, now they have to come up with a way that they can allow the person to receive the blessings of the church.Let me explain this to people who maybe don’t understand annulment.If you are in the Catholic Church and you are married in the Catholic Church and you have a divorce, your wife seeks a divorce or whatever, but you are divorced, well if you stay divorced and again, you don’t remarry, there are certain things you can still do within the church.But if you decide to marry as a divorced person then you cannot receive the sacraments.For example, “Divorced Catholics are banned from participating in the rites of the church.”I’m quoting from another part of the article which we didn’t have time to read all of it.In fact there’s nothing that a divorced Catholic can’t do from receiving the sacrament of communion to participating fully in parish life.But it becomes a problem with the divorced Catholic chooses to remarry.Without an annulment of the first marriage, remarried Catholics are considered forbidden from receiving communion.Now this is the Eucharist, a major sacrament, so they are in trouble.

Dave:

Yes, so the whole idea behind annulment is this is a way to get around what the church supposedly stood for.Opposes divorce, but it grants, I didn’t see the figures in this article, at least the part that was read, but more than 60,000 annulments are granted by the Catholic Church per year in the United States.Now that—

Tom:

At a fee of at some dioceses of $800.Dave let me give you the stats:American dioceses process about 60,000 annulment cases a year, accounting for 75% of such cases world-wide.As recently as 1968 there were about 400 cases in the United States.Now days, that number of cases is handled by the Dioceses of Lansing in a typical year.So this problem is not going away.

Dave:

Tom it is divorce by another name; it’s a technicality of getting around a rule that the church had.But also Tom, this is typical of the Catholic Church.For example, you wear a scapular; whoever dies wearing this scapular shall not suffer eternal fire.You can buy someone’s way out of Purgatory by giving an offering to the church to get enough masses said to get them out and the one you buy may just be the one that opens the door to heaven.The Bible doesn’t say that.It says the soul that sins it must die. There is only one way and it is through the shedding of the blood of Jesus Christ.We must be made right with God and you don’t make rules about this so the Catholic Church has come up with another rule.They even change rules.It used to be a mortal sin to eat meat on Friday, now it isn’t anymore.What about the poor guys that are in hell because they ate meat on Friday?Changing it didn’t help them.

Tom:

Bad timing.

Dave:

Yes.

Tom:

Dave, seriously this grieves me.As a former Catholic and as someone who really loves Catholics, because this is not representative of the true and living God, the God of the Bible.It’s just not.

Dave:

Exactly.