Sydney Cardinal George Pell has backed a warning by Pope Benedict for marriage tribunals not to fall into the trap of making "exaggerated and almost automatic multiplication of declarations of nullity." Granting marriage annulments too easily and without real cause plays into a modern form of pessimism that basically says human beings are not able to make lifelong commitments to loving another person, Pope Benedict told members of the Tribunal of the Roman Rota last week, Catholic News Service reports.
"We run the risk of falling into an anthropological pessimism which, in the light of today's cultural situation, considers it almost impossible to marry," the pope said.
Pope Benedict said there is still a need to deal with a problem Pope John Paul II pointed out in a 1987 speech to the Roman Rota, that of saving the Church community from "the scandal of seeing the value of Christian marriage destroyed in practice by the exaggerated and almost automatic multiplication of declarations of nullity."
He said tribunal judges must remember there is a difference between the full maturity and understanding that people should strive to develop over time and "canonical maturity, which is the minimum point of departure for the validity of a marriage."
In addition, he said, granting an annulment on the basis of the "psychic incapacity" of the husband or wife requires that the tribunal establish and document the fact that the person had a serious psychological or psychiatric problem at the time the wedding was celebrated.
Defending the marriage bond gives witness to the fact that the ability to love and to pledge oneself to another forever is part of human nature, he said.
The Church's insistence that it is possible for the vast majority of people to make a lasting commitment to marriage can help couples "discover the natural reality of marriage and the importance it has in the plan of salvation," Pope Benedict said.
It is true that human nature is limited and imperfect, but that does not mean that people, "exercising human freedom supported by grace," cannot make a commitment to loving each other and raising a family together, he said.
Interviewed by the ABC, Sydney Cardinal Pell said that the Church is "caught between a rock and a hard place".
"The Lord himself, we have got to follow his teaching, his strict teachings against divorce and remarriage and also of course, we don't want to be imposing unnecessary burdens on Catholics.
"So it's a hard call and the Pope is reminding us that people like myself and the Canon law officers, we've got to do, try to work out exactly what the Lord would want in particular situations," Cardinal Pell said.
'If a person is genuinely and radically immature, that is the grounds for an annulment. But because a person is a typical 20 or 21 year old it's difficult to see how that would be ground for a declaration that there wasn't a genuine marriage," Cardinal Pell said.
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(Source: CTHN)