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."