Time magazine announced yesterday that Sheila Rauch Kennedy was able to successfully defend her marriage with the intervention of the Roman Rota, against the Boston Archdiocese Catholic Tribunal.The Boston Tribunal had mistakenly decided that her marriage was invalid making her husband free to remarry.
Sheila stated, “The [annulment] process was dishonest, and it was important to stand up and say that."
Another wife, Bai Macfarlane of Cleveland, Ohio, also has a case pending at the Roman Rota in which she is seeking the intervention of the Vatican and challenging a US Catholic Tribunal’s failure to uphold marriage, but Mrs. Macfarlane is asking the Church to uphold it’s own canon law regarding separation and divorce, not remarriage and annulment.
In May of 2004, Mrs. Macfarlane had asked the Cleveland Tribunal for an investigation of her marriage praying that the Church would advise her husband that he never had a licit reason to abandon her to seek a civil no-fault divorce.
According to the Catholic code of canon law, there are limited reasons to separate from one’s spouse (can 1151-1155). Those who agree to marry following canon law can never seek a civil separation or divorce unless it is foreseen that the civil judgments would not be contrary to divine law (canon 1692).
Before every Catholic exchange of vows, both parents promise to raise children according to the law of Christ and his Church (Rite of Marriage sec. 59).
Mrs. Macfarlane is defending her children against her husband’s requested no-fault divorce, in which children are forcibly separated from the dedicated spouse much, or most of the time; children and the dedicated spouse are financially devastated because they lose the benefit of two parents working together to maintain one household for life; and the dedicated spouse who loses the children is typically forced to pay for the upbringing of his own children with whom he is not even allowed to live. Macfarlane states, “Anyone with a heart, would recognize that this routine is contrary to divine law.”
When Mrs. Macfarlane asked for the Tribunal’s intervention in May of 2004, the Cleveland diocese would not even accept her petition, and she, like Sheila Rauch Kennedy appealed to Rome for help. In January of 2005 the Roman Rota accepted her case, and on May 9th, 2007 her advocate submitted a written argument on her behalf.
After her husband had abandoned her, with the Mary’s Advocates project, Mrs. Macfarlane has connected with others throughout the country who are working to protect traditional marriage from the no-fault divorce, family separation routine, which is contrary to the promises both spouses made before marriage in any Christian tradition.
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