TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93TT0208> <title> Aug. 16, 1993: Till Annulment Do Us Part </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993 Aug. 16, 1993 Overturning The Reagan Era </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> RELIGION, Page 43 Till Annulment Do Us Part </hdr> <body> Vatican experts find the U.S. church far too lax in granting "Catholic divorces" By RICHARD N. OSTLING--With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/New York, Michele Donley/Chicago and John Moo It was the kind of news that makes society columns tingle. A Kennedy wedding was in the works. Three weeks ago, Representative Joseph P. Kennedy II, 40, the eldest son of Robert Kennedy, announced his engagement to a member of his staff, Anne Elizabeth Kelly, 36. But no church ceremony has yet been set for this scion of the country's most famous Roman Catholic clan. Indeed, the question is, Can there be one? In a 1990 civil case, the Congressman divorced his wife Sheila Rauch, the mother of their twin sons Matthew and Joseph. Kennedy and his wife had been married in the church--and remain so in its eyes. The church, furthermore, will not allow Kennedy to remarry in its precincts--unless he gets an annulment. Through history, petitions for annulment have sometimes proved traumatic for the church. King Henry VIII's wish to set aside Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn led to a schism that has yet to be healed. But Kennedy, who has applied for an annulment of his first marriage, is an American and, if statistics bear him out, the probability is that U.S. church courts will grant one fairly promptly. In fact, 75% of all annulments the Catholic Church annually hands out are bestowed by American tribunals. In 1991 the U.S. accounted for 41,121 of 54,137 granted--44 times the number for Italy, which has a Catholic population of similar size. That is a dramatic increase from the 1968 American figure of 338. The Vatican has duly noted the phenomenon--and is not pleased. In June, Archbishop Vincenzo Fagiolo, a top canon-law official of the Holy See, issued a thunderous condemnation. The "extraordinary" increases, he declared, are undermining the church's teaching on the permanence of marriage and causing "grave scandal." Pope John Paul II, who will be in Colorado for an international youth rally this week, is thought to share that concern. After all, Jesus declared in the Scriptures, "What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder." Annulment is known jocularly as "Catholic divorce"--a way to marry again and yet remain a church member in good standing. An ecclesiastical tribunal weighs technicalities to declare that a first marriage never existed, leaving a believer free to enter into matrimony since he or she had never been truly married at all. Annulments used to be rare, passed out mostly for such reasons as insanity, impotence, bigamy, abduction, fraud, or consanguinity--the basis in 1983 for annulling the marriage of Rudolph Giuliani, now the Republican candidate for New York City mayor, to his second cousin. By the 1970s, however, the Roman Rota--the main Vatican court for handling marital appeals--began to recognize psychological factors. The annulment of the marriage of Monaco's Princess Caroline and French playboy Philippe Junot reportedly hinged on such grounds, but the case was so complex it took a decade to decide. The Pope has warned the Roman Rota to avoid a "permissive mentality" in applying the new psychological tests--but that lesson seems largely unheeded in the U.S. Critics charge that American tribunals sometimes stretch psychological factors to include a spouse who is ill-tempered or overly dependent. Says a Vatican official: "If you allow reasons like that to pass, no one should get married." Asks another prelate, "Is it possible that there are that many Americans--and it's only Americans--suffering from grave psychic deficiencies?" The Americans make no apologies for liberally interpreting in psychological terms the 1983 canon provision of "grave lack of discretion of judgment" as grounds for annulment. According to Father Michael Hack, judicial vicar for the Archdiocese of Chicago, this can refer to people who do not treat their spouses as equals, those who come from dysfunctional families and repeat destructive patterns from childhood, and spouses who have trouble handling adult responsibilities. Leaders of the American tribunals say there are other explanations for the big numbers. The process was once so complex and expensive that only upper-crust Catholics resorted to annulments. Under a democratized and simplified American system, dioceses absorb 61% of the court costs, charge modest fees by civil-divorce-court standards ($400 in Los Angeles, $1,050 in Brooklyn, New York), and usually help out if petitioners are poor. Father Craig Cox of the Los Angeles Archdiocese says the U.S. bishops have done their best to let parishioners know about their right to petition for annulments, whereas "in the past there were opportunities, but people didn't know they had them." When all circumstances of the U.S. annulment wave are considered, says Jon Nilson, an associate professor of theology at Chicago's Loyola University, Vatican criticism is not fair. "What they don't take into account is that we are perhaps a little more psychologically sophisticated than certain parts of the world." He says, "It is the American church trying to be both realistic and compassionate." That means a lot more annulments--for better or for worse. </body> </article> </text>