Annulments again.

Professor Robert H. Vasoli, the author of What God Has Joined Together (Oxford University Press, 1998; see C.I., March 1999, pp. 8-10), has returned to his attack on easy annulments in the Church ("Catholic Divorce? Updating the U.S. Annulment Explosion," Culture Wars, Jan. 2001).

An annulment is a declaration that a marriage ceremony was invalid. "Were data for Canada, where annulments are also freely granted, added to the U.S. figures, North America would be responsible for 80-85% of annulments decreed worldwide," he states. "The U.S., which has 6% of the world's Catholic population, has 75% of the ordinary process annulments".

Most of these annulments are granted in virtue of Canon Law #1095, which requires "a grave lack of discretionary judgment concerning the essential matrimonial rights and obligation" involved. Vasoli thinks that very many of them are actually granted for only some lack, which is quite a different thing. "97% of petitions accepted by American tribunals resulted in affirmative decisions," yet, when decisions were appealed to the Vatican Marriage Tribunal, 95% of those appealed were overturned.

Vasoli states that "somehow a tribunal divines, often decades after the fact, that at least one of the parties was psychologically incapable of valid marriage." And he contends that most tribunals cannot afford professional psychologists, that even when they can the treatment of the case is often superficial, and that what goes on is frequently "tortuous inventiveness," "parlour psychologizing," "junk science," a "psychological guessing game," so that "thousands of unions regarded as marriage by ordinary folks are wiped out...by a mixture of canonical fiat and legerdemain."

He claims, too, that some spouses, astounded that their marriages could be declared invalid, are driven out of the Church, and that the present system also fosters divorce because annulments are so easy to get and many dioceses require that a couple be divorced before an annulment request will be dealt with.

He says also that many priests grant annulments privately in the confessional, telling people that they may go to Communion even though they are in a second marriage. And that they often do this without assuring that the strict conditions attached to this "internal forum" solution, in the very rare cases when it can be used, are actually accepted and carried out.

In general, Christ's teaching about the indissolubility of marriage is being denied. And, Vasoli concludes, there is not much hope for the immediate future: "Occasionally one meets a canonist, an active tribunalist, who admits that many annulments are farcical--or one eased off a tribunal for being insufficiently congenial toward permissive annulment--but the U.S. Canon law community, with some notable exceptions, presents what is pretty much a united front."