Vatican: Marriage Annulment Requests Soar

VATICAN CITY (AP) - The Vatican said Tuesday requests for marriage annulments have been soaring, with one cardinal lamenting that some Roman Catholics view them as a kind of church-sanctioned equivalent of divorce.

On the heels of heavy criticism by Pope John Paul II that annulments are granted far too easily, the Vatican made public a revised handbook of rules for Church marriage tribunals worldwide, reflecting 1983 changes in overall canon law.

``In the context of a divorce mentality, even canon annulment cases can be easily misunderstood, as if they weren't anything more than ways to obtain a divorce with the blessing of the church,'' said Cardinal Julian Herranz, head of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, in unveiling the handbook, called ``Dignity of Marriage.''

However, he said it was too early to tell if the updated guidelines would result in fewer annulments being granted, especially by tribunals in U.S. dioceses, which for years now have roughly accounted for two-thirds of the favorable rulings worldwide.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4785986,00.html

Just like everything else, the conservatives are cracking down everywhere.

Catholic annulments in the US are granted by Bishop in the area's diocese. There are hundreds of questions to be answered about your past marriage. Questions that can come back and hurt your children. Most people don't answer the questions, especially if your divorce was 10/20 years back and the church needs to contact your ex husband, your ex in-laws and ex friends, and your children.

To make it short, the church files the papers somewhere and for $400 to 4Mils, will grant you an annulment.

You can take communion, no one stops you.

or crack down on annulments. To say that a couple who have been married for years and have several children do not have a real marriage is obscene. Talk about defending marriage! The Church should just recognize that tragic as it is, marriages do fail and people need to be granted a divorce sometimes for the good of everyone involved, including the children. Divorce is not good for children but neither is living in a household where the adults are screaming at each other. That is not to say that divorce should be a little more difficult than just saying "see ya."

let no-one put asunder."

There's marriage, and then there's sacramental marriage. They're not the same.

The Church doesn't say that annulled marriages were not legally valid marriages.

It just says they didn't constitute a sacrament, or a marriage in the true Christian sense of the term. "These two folks may have been joined together--but it wasn't God who did the joining. Hence, this joining can properly be put asunder."

But if God did the joining, then no, no-one should put that asunder. To do so would violate God's will. The tricky part is determining whether the joining was God's will or not. Let's say it is, but one party insists upon pursuing an adulterous relationship--should the Church just sanction that?

On the other hand, let's say that the adulterer was so psychologically immature that on his/her wedding day, s/he was not genuinely capable of appreciating the sacramental or true nature of marriage, as it is understood by the Church. Well, in the latter case, s/he would have been incapable of being a minister of the sacrament. In Catholic theology, the ministers of the sacrament of marriage are the couple getting married, not the priest. If their consent is defective in some way, then they cannot validly confer the sacrement.

This link gives information on the grounds for nullity according to Canon Law.

has the power to forgive my sins on God's behalf, but he can't decide that my marriage was not valid?

Marriage, by its very nature, is a public relationship. So settling whether there is one or not requires a public judgement.

Even the civil law recognizes this in terms of the divorce laws.

Sin and contrition for sin, on the other hand, are not inherently public by nature. So settling whether a sin has been committed, or whether a sinner is contrite, does not inherently require a public judgement.... thank God.