THE POPE has complained that marriage annulments are being given away too easily to Catholic couples experiencing the ordinary difficulties of married life.
He told the Vatican's Sacred Rota tribunal - the Vatican court for annulments - to be more severe in its judgments and only to consider cases where there was a "real incapacity to carry out one's marital duties".
He said he feared that tribunal judges were being influenced by the social trend of individualism and the growing perception of marriage as a mere contract.
"The Canon law is only the expression of an underlying anthropological and theological reality," he said, adding that a subjective outlook of the world ignored Man's metaphysical nature.
Couples, he said, had to accept that staying together meant making sacrifices and enduring times of unhappiness and strife.
The Sacred Rota handles applications from all over the world which have not been resolved in the two compulsory hearings carried out in the dioceses. It has 814 cases outstanding.
Thousands of cases are heard in Britain every year in closed marriage tribunals of three judges, usually priests who are qualified canon lawyers.
Cases are only passed to the Vatican court if the judgment of the first hearing is in favour of annulment and the court of appeal - which happens automatically - comes out against.
Annulments are particular to the Roman Catholic Church which does not recognise divorce and will only allow its faithful to remarry if they can prove that the sacrament of their existing marriage was invalid.
The Rota has been too liberal in the Pope's eyes and in 1985 - the last year that records were published - it granted annulments to almost half the couples who applied.
The reasons were not always convincing. One Italian couple's marriage was dissolved because they argued about politics.
