Marriage and annulment, then versus now
Is this even the same religion? I hate to put it that way, but the difference is night and day. Clear your mind and see if you don’t agree. For almost 2,000 years, we had this mentality:
Q. I have a friend who was married a few years ago. He was Catholic, and so was the girl. They were married in the Church. After two months she decided he wasn’t the guy she wanted; so she left him and got a divorce. She is now living with her fourth husband.
Isn’t there any way my friend can get his marriage cancelled and still remain in the Church? He would like to go out with girls, but doesn’t want to give them a reputation of dating a divorcee. It would really put his mind at ease if he could just know that he could get married in the Church, if he ever wanted to marry again. It seems such a pity that just being married two months can wreck his whole future when it really was an unforeseen mistake.
A. I don't know your friend, but I find myself admiring him. He is a hero and it is well, because a hero is just what God is asking him to be. If he is to serve God and save his soul, he will have to keep on making heroic sacrifices of marital happiness. He has a wife, even though she is a bum. So he cannot have a second one. That would be bigamy. A decent married man does not go out with girls. So your friend behaves himself. God bless him and reward him.
The Church does not go about ''cancelling"marriages. She wouldn't do it for Henry VIII; so she lost all England. She won't do it for your friend, even though he lose his soul and drag someone else down to hell with him. She will not, because she CANNOT. It is a law of God. The Church cannot break God's laws.
The Church would like for your friend to have his mind at ease. Peace of mind is good for the soul. But not peace at any price. We will never acquire real peace of mind by breaking the law of God. We do not always find peace the easy way. It sometimes takes heroic sacrifice. I think your friend has found the way.
It is a pity, indeed, that just one marriage should "wreck his whole future." But polio, or T.B., or an auto wreck might do as thorough a job, and just as quickly. You are wrong in supposing that "two months" of marriage wrecked his life. It was much quicker than that; it was done in an instant—that instant in which he said: “I will.” You see, he married for life. He made a solemn, sacred contract before God and the Church, and he knew well that there was no backing out once it was made. God give him strength to keep the contract he made.
And may God protect other young men from making such contracts with bums! And protect good young girls, too, from giving themselves for life to handsome hopeless hoboes.
At least half the answer is in choosing the right gal, or the right guy. It’s hard to be sure, of course, but it will help to use your brains. Lead with your head, not with your heart. The first choice has to be the right one.
Your friend should talk his case over with a priest of course. There is about one chance in a million that his marriage might have been invalid for some reason which you have not indicated. If the marriage is not invalid, he should accept facts as they are, and continue to live as a married man—whose wife is away. He must be careful not to go to hell, himself; because he would surely meet her there.
And now, in the wake of modernism, we have this mentality:
Cherie Sherrier was 27 years into her marriage when she found herself praying to Our Lady Undoer of Knots. She recently had found out her husband and the father of their three children was having an affair. Intent on saving the marriage, she turned to Our Lady in a popular devotion for those in complicated or difficult situations.
“I was willing to forgive him and move on,” she said. She wanted to try counseling, but “in his mind, the marriage was over.”
As she continued to pray the devotion, a friend told her, “Those knots will be undone, but maybe not in the way you were hoping.”
As issues within the marriage continued, a family friend convinced her husband to do a Retrouvaille retreat for spouses facing difficulties. Sherrier went into the retreat ready to make things work. Instead she discovered that her relationship was over.
After a nine-month legal process she described as “excruciating” that included a 12-hour mediation with attorneys, the divorce was finalized. Recovering from the ordeal, she felt there was still an unresolved aspect.
“In the eyes of the church, I’m still married,” she said.
She approached her pastor, Father Dennis W. Kleinmann of St. Veronica Church in Chantilly, who had supported her during the divorce, and began the process of petitioning the diocese for a declaration of nullity, commonly known as an annulment.
After completing the forms, Father Kleinmann submitted the petition on her behalf last month to the diocesan tribunal. There, the petition will land on the desk of Father Robert J. Rippy, judicial vicar, who oversees all annulments for the diocese.
Annulment process
Annulments make up about 95 percent of the work of the tribunal, Father Rippy said. Last year, the tribunal received 106 cases, down from past years, but the numbers are going up again. In the last decade, the office has seen some changes, including digitizing the required forms and no longer charging a fee, a Vatican directive in 2015.
As judicial vicar, Father Rippy reviews all the petitions, assigns judges and sets the grounds for the annulment.
“What happens in an annulment process is the marriage is put on trial. It’s a court,” said Father Rippy. “The grounds are what we are trying to resolve. What was the controversy that was going on in the marriage.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that a valid marriage bond is indissoluble: “Thus the marriage bond has been established by God himself in such a way that a marriage concluded and consummated between baptized persons can never be dissolved. This bond, which results from the free human act of the spouses and their consummation of the marriage, is a reality, henceforth irrevocable, and gives rise to a covenant guaranteed by God’s fidelity. The Church does not have the power to contravene this disposition of divine wisdom.”
In an annulment, the church examines whether or not a valid marriage bond exists.
Father Rippy said common grounds for annulment are lack of due discretion, such as immaturity on the part of one or both parties or pressure from their families to marry; intention against having children; and psychological incapacity. In the case of the latter, the tribunal would assign a clinician to the case to assess the psychological and/or psychiatric health of the parties involved.
“What (the church) really wants to know is about your childhood and upbringing,” said Sherrier, the engagement, any traumatic events that may have happened, anything that could have impacted the spouses’ abilities to fulfill the requirements for a valid marriage.
Every case is assigned a three-judge panel, one of whom is always a priest, and a defender of the bond of marriage. The person seeking the annulment, known as the petitioner, is summoned for a deposition. The ex-spouse, or respondent, is notified of the petition and invited to participate. Church law requires that the respondent be notified of the petition but does not require the respondent’s involvement.
The process includes the deposition and testimony from at least three witnesses selected by the petitioner.
“The onus is on the petitioner to prove the invalidity of the marriage,” said Father Rippy. He said the decision is based on facts, not feelings. “It has to be based on the facts as presented to us.”
The defender of the bond reviews the case and makes a recommendation based on the evidence. Then all the information returns to the three judges, who review, discuss and make a decision. One of the judges then writes the sentence, a document that includes the facts of the case, the grounds, the judges’ argument based on the evidence, and conclusion. The tribunal tries to provide the sentence within a year from the time of the deposition, Father Rippy said.
Of the 100-plus petitions submitted annually to the diocese, as many as 90 percent are granted, Father Rippy estimated.
Finding healing
While the annulment process is legalistic, unlike divorce, it recognizes the spiritual component as well. “It is truly a healing ministry,” said Father Rippy. “A lot of people are fearful,” and he recognizes that it’s difficult to relive bad memories from the marriage and relationship, but it’s “cathartic in that it allows you to self-empty that stuff again and get rid of it for the final time.”
Closure was why Bill Inserra, a parishioner of St. Francis of Assisi Church in Triangle, petitioned for an annulment. He was shocked when—23 years into his marriage—he discovered his wife wanted to separate. He prolonged the process of the separation for three and a half years, in hopes that with some time and space his wife would return to the relationship. But the divorce ultimately was finalized, and a month later he began the annulment process.
“My pursuit of the annulment was my attempt at trying to find closure,” he said. He still felt bewildered at why what he considered a happy marriage had ended after more than two decades. “I was really interested in closure and trying to get help from the church.”
In the process, he was permitted to read his ex-wife’s testimony to the tribunal, who had agreed to participate in the process. Her testimony included her view on the marriage, and that provided him some clarity.
“I didn’t get all the answers I was hoping for, but at the end of the day it helped me make my transition,” he said.
The process took about two years, and he received confirmation of the annulment last June. Receiving the news created a mix of feelings.
“I think it was a combination of sadness because something that I thought was one of the happiest experiences of my life” was over. “But there was at the same time … a sense of relief,” he said, adding that he can now begin rebuilding himself and moving forward.
“It was a sad ending; it became a new beginning.”
Moving forward
For Sherrier, after her husband left, she was in “constant turmoil.”
Going through the annulment process, which she began in 2019, has been both painful and healing. “They ask some very specific, personal questions. It was painful to go through that.” Sometimes she had to put the petition aside and step away for a bit. But now, she said, “It helped me to understand why the marriage failed. It’s healing in that I understand now why the marriage didn’t work out.”
She also found support through the Mornings of Mercy for Divorced Catholics, run by the diocesan Office of Marriage, Family and Respect Life. “That’s kind of what helped me and my faith recover from this very traumatic event,” she said.
And she started her own business—St. Anne Companion Care—working with seniors.
“I love working with the elderly,” she said. “I know this is what God wants me to do. I don’t think I ever would have figured that out if I hadn’t gone through divorce.”
“The whole experience has brought me closer to my faith.”
Folks, there is no way these two worldviews on marriage and annulment are compatible. In no universe can they be reconciled. So, which is it? Which is true? Is it the traditional understanding represented in the first example, taken from a popular pamphlet from the 1950s and echoing the perennial teaching of the Church? Or is it the 2023 contemporary understanding represented in the second example, which is an article from a diocesan publication/website promoting the annulment process?
If you are still confused, ask yourself: which priest would you trust with care of your soul and its eternal destiny?
I get that we modern Catholics want everyone to be happy, but we went from loving, firm, and unambiguous spiritual warnings about the duty to remain faithful to sacred marriage promises even in bad times, to a ubiquitous marketing and selling of annulments as a quasi-sacramental “healing ministry” that not only could but seemingly should be pursued for purposes of one’s own happiness.
Now, 1955 may seem like eons ago to some readers, but consider that there are over 20 million people in America who were alive when the first piece above was written. And that universal Catholic understanding continued for at least 15 more years, so if you are in your mid-fifties or older, it was within your lifetime that the big inversion occurred—it’s that new. The switch to this opposite mentality happened so quickly in America—in six years we went from around 340 annulments per year to tens of thousands per year—that we should all have whiplash. (To begin your investigation into what happened, start here, here, here, and here).
Please believe me; I am not ascribing bad will to those who work at the tribunals. How could I know their hearts or what they have been taught to believe and do? I imagine that most believe they are doing the right thing, helping people “return to the sacraments” and “move forward” through “healing” and “mercy.” But of course tribunals are not primarily about healing (that is what spiritual directors and therapists are for) or mercy (that is what baptism and confession are for) or returning to the sacraments (anyone who repents, confesses and maintains a state of grace can receive the sacraments, with no tribunal needed). A tribunal is a court of law seeking objective truth about whether there were real and objective impediments at the time of the vows (and not a day, a week, or a year after). Period.
Today in America, Catholics helping other Catholics find a way out of their Catholic marriages is a very big machine, and it hums along a certain way and in a certain direction. I myself used to support that system on the layman’s end of things, steering family and friends toward annulment and with no concern that they wouldn’t get one (they always did). I’ve repented of that; I’ve confessed it. The temporal effects remain, however—in the parishes, in the community, in the extended family, with the spouses who didn’t want any of this, and with the children, who will carry the effects of the loss of their family for their entire lives, and into future generations.
Do we want to continue this historical anomaly, where the expectation is that miserable marriages can (and probably should) end in divorce and annulment? Do we want to live in a world where a tribunal psychologist laments that she could conceivably make a case for every marriage being null (and was subtly expected to do so)? Where a veteran tribunal judge asks me to entitle my next book, Does the Catholic Church Believe in Marriage Anymore? Where a member of a tribunal staff tells me with regret that his tribunal works off a “customer model”? Where we further abandon the abandoned spouse who never wanted the divorce or annulment in the first place?
We need a massive corrective, folks. You know it and I know it. The annulment culture within the Church is doing a number on all of us, and on the psyche of married Catholics and those who hope to be married.
As Providence would have it, it was after I started writing this that I realized today is the feast of two martyrs for marriage, St. John Fisher (Queen Catherine’s canon lawyer, who successfully defended the queen’s marriage to King Henry VIII against the evil king’s attempt to have it declared null) and St. Thomas More, who loved his friend Henry, loved his country, loved his family, but loved the Truth of Christ and His Church all the more.
St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More, pray for us!
