c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ The Roman Catholic Church’s annulment procedures are now a free fire zone for those furious at their one-time marital partners who have challenged the validity of their failed marriages.

Both Sheila Rauch Kennedy, in her 1997 book”Shattered Faith”(Pantheon), and retired Notre Dame sociologist Robert H. Vasoli, in his”What God has Joined Together”(Oxford University Press), have written angry diatribes against annulments. They are patent efforts to destroy this approach to permitting the divorced and remarried back into the church.

Vasoli’s new book is an attack on theologians, canon lawyers, bishops, and the whole”pastoral”approach to marriage. It purports to be defending the sanctity and indissolubility of marriage against those who have, in effect, invented a form of Catholic divorce.

By permitting annulments, he argues, the church is simply encouraging divorce. That it might be the other way around, that the annulment procedures are an attempt to respond to the increase in divorce, does not seem to occur to Vasoli.

The book is innocent of nuance, qualification, and serious attempts to understand the other side of the annulment story. It is also a triumphal response to his wife, whose appeal for a decree of nullity he was able to persuade Rome to reverse. That showed her, I guess.

I do not propose to defend annulments here. I consider them a practical response to the situation in which the church finds itself today. Another, simpler solution, would be to permit the divorced and remarried to receive the sacraments, something Pope John Paul II resolutely refuses to do, despite appeals from hierarchies around the world.

Rather, I want to ask the question: When does a marriage becomes a sacrament?

This is an issue of sacramental theology which theologians are either afraid to touch or too busy with”political”issues to be concerned about.

While Catholic laity value the sacraments enormously and young Catholics describe the presence of God in the sacraments as one of the key components of their Catholic identity, their teachers and leaders have not provided adequate instruction about what precisely a sacrament is and what makes up the sacramentality of marriage.

A sacrament, as I understand it, is a sign of the presence of God.

Marriage is a sacrament, a sign of God, as St. Paul himself said, of the love between Christ and the church, between God and humankind. And the love between a husband and wife reflects this love.

Fair enough, though I suspect for many of my readers this will sound like an original and perhaps dangerous idea. It isn’t. Read through the marriage liturgy and you will find that theme everywhere.

Most annulments are based on the assumption that not every marriage contract established on a wedding day is sufficiently mature to reflect the intense, self-emptying reality of God’s gift of himself to his people.

Sacramentality is not something that is given; it is something sought after, earned, achieved. For some reason, canonists are afraid to speak that assumption. Perhaps they think _ not unreasonably _ it will sound like gibberish to those whose education in sacramental theology is weak _ and that is most people.

But it is my impression, as a social scientist and parish priest, that many marriages have from their beginning been so steeped in mutual selfishness, immaturity, and egotism that, no matter how many children have been produced and how long the relationship has persisted, it would be ludicrous to say the marriage gives even a slight hint of God’s self-emptying love for humankind.

I make this observation not to justify annulments, but to challenge theologians and teachers to develop a deeper and richer theory of marital love, a subject they avoid as though it were a dangerous virus.

Thus, the question is: Through what struggles, heartaches, pleasures and joys must a man and a woman travel on pilgrimage before one can look at their relationship and say,”Yeah, that’s kind of how God loves us?” That kind of marriage is surely indissoluble and hence a sacrament. Might it not be that instead of marriage being indissoluble because it is a sacrament, a marriage becomes a sacrament when the love is so great that indissolubility has become an unquestioned given?

DEA END GREELEY