Posted on by Bonald

Zippy makes similar points for strictness in the annulment process here and here (although he would not agree with all of my points below). In the interest of pushing the Overton window, I’m going to throw out the most extreme position–abolish annulments entirely–which is still more sensible than the current direction. The zero-annulment policy, I claim, should be, if not our actual policy, the default policy, any deviation from which must be strenuously argued. Anyone proposing a law to allow annulment under such-and-such circumstance must demonstrate convincingly that it cannot be abused by an ecclesiastic legal system with strong incentives to laxity, that it will not give false impressions to a laity with strong inclinations to form such impressions, and so forth.

With a very stringent annulment policy, some marriages that are genuinely not valid will not be recognized as such by the Church, leading the Church to place unnecessary burdens on some people–namely that they cannot marry anyone other than their current putative spouses. With a very liberal annulment policy, some marriages that were validly contracted will be falsely declared null by the Church, so that the spouses will feel authorized to enter into what are in fact adulterous unions, bringing spiritual harm to them, confusion to the faithful, and ill-use to the sacraments. Which way to err? It is clear to me that we must error strongly to the side of presumptive validity. In fact, a good case can be made that the Church should never grant annulments, even though there presumably are some invalid marriages out there.

Some have suggested that many marriages are invalid because Catholics don’t understand what they’re getting into when they marry in the Church. A lax annulment policy fosters such confusion. The certain consequence of the pope’s recent annulment streamlining is to convince most Catholics that the Church does not in fact regard marriage as indissoluble, that annulment is just a legal fiction to dissolve unwanted unions. As this belief spreads, there will be many more invalid unions (assuming, for the moment, that this sort of misunderstanding does invalidate a marriage), many more couples stuck in unknowing fornication. If the Church simply refused to grant annulments, in a generation everyone would know that getting married in the Church is an irrevocable thing, and so anyone who chose to do so would do so validly (or, at least, the marriage wouldn’t be invalid for ignorance of Church teaching). To summarize this point, we must consider the message a given policy sends. I, for one, do not think it a fault of the previous system that even valid annulments should take a great deal of time and effort to process. It should be clear to everyone that something extraordinary is being asked of the Church. In any case, a pious Catholic who learns that he has abused a sacrament, even inadvertently, should see the appropriateness of a multi-year purification process before jumping in again. The American experience proves that ecclesiastic courts can’t withstand the pressure to grant annulments liberally. In most annulment cases, there are two parties, their friends, and prospective new “spouses” who want a declaration of nullity, and no one pushing for the other outcome. Any rules in place, no matter how strictly orthodox, will be bent into unrestricted laxity. The Church simply cannot trust herself with any wiggle room. Even in the individual case, it is less damaging to incorrectly refuse an annulment than to incorrectly grant one. An unnecessary burden is less spiritually hazardous than a license to sin. Common sense rebels against the idea that many people who’ve gone through a wedding ceremony and years thinking they are married may one day discover that they are in fact not married. Is getting married really so hard? If so, shouldn’t we all abstain from sleeping with those whom we believe to be our wives, because there’s a fifty-fifty chance that we would actually be fornicating? Wouldn’t such scrupulosity be madness? But why do we all recognize it as madness? Because we all recognize that the ecclesiastic regime of mass annulment is BS. Possibly very few unnecessary burdens would exist in a no-annulment regime.

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