c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Wedding season is in full swing. I know this because of the four giddy, gorgeously engraved save-the-date cards or invitations that arrived in the mail in recent weeks.

One of my stepsons got engaged last month, and one of my best friends from college _ the guy we thought would sooner become a monk than get married _ announced he’s tying the knot in August.

And my own husband and I are busy planning our 10th wedding anniversary trip to Zanzibar in October.

Engagements, weddings, anniversaries _ these are the hopeful, joyful moments of marriage. But they’re not the whole story. Half of all marriages in this country end in divorce, and that statistic varies only negligibly from one religious group to another.

The decision to end a marriage often is one full of sorrow, disappointment, anguish and even shame. It’s the last resort. But sometimes it’s a necessary evil.

What feels absolutely unnecessary, however, is the religious notion of annulment. In the Catholic tradition, which does not recognize divorces between couples who have been joined together in sacramental, holy matrimony, it is possible, however, to have a marriage declared null and void.

A “Declaration of Nullity,” as Catholic annulment is technically known, does not mean the marriage never happened. It just means it was never a valid union from the beginning. Which is not a great comfort to many going through the annulment process, particularly those who do not wish to have their marriage annulled in the first place.

Take Sheila Rauch Kennedy, for example, who married Joseph Kennedy II, a Catholic and the godson of former President John F. Kennedy, in 1979. A year later, the couple had twin boys. In 1991, they divorced. Two years later, Joseph Kennedy remarried.

Sometime after the divorce, Joseph Kennedy sought and was granted an annulment to his marriage to Sheila Rauch. Problem was, Rauch says she had no idea he asked for an annulment. Rauch appealed the annulment to the Vatican, and earlier this month, a church appeals court ruled in her favor, reversing the annulment. So, in the eyes of the church, Joseph Kennedy II, married to his current wife for 14 years, is still married sacramentally to Sheila Rauch. He can, in turn, appeal the appeal.

Catholic politicians Rudy Giuliani and John Kerry both have had marriages annulled. But what, I beg you, is the spiritual purpose of such theological acrobatics?

There are more than 6 million divorced Roman Catholics in the United States. According to the Vatican’s 2004 Statistical Yearbook of the Church, 70,235 annulments were granted worldwide in 2004, including 53,885 to Catholics in the United States. That’s more than 75 percent of all annulments granted by the church.

To an outsider, the Catholic practice of annulling marriages _ even those that have lasted 10, 20 or more years and produced multiple children _ seems at odds with the notion of divorce as a sin. Either it is or it isn’t.

Some who have gone through the process call it healing. Others say it’s agonizing and ostracizing.

Either allow divorced Catholics to get married again in the church, and/or come back to the Communion table as full members, or don’t.

Annulment is like a theological sleight of hand.

Pastorally speaking, the coexistence of annulments with the prohibition on divorce “is like being stretched out between galloping horses,” said the Rev. Donald Senior, president of Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union.

“Some would say it’s become in effect a kind of technical knockout,” Senior said of annulments. “I think it’s not theologically or theoretically inconsistent … but how it may be applied, you wonder sometimes.”

The vast majority of annulments _ something like 98 percent in the United States _ are granted on the basis of some sort of “defect of consent,” which I’ve seen defined in innumerable ways.

But what it essentially means is that when the person or persons exchanged vows before God and witnesses, they didn’t know what they were getting themselves into.

Who among us married folks _ whether it’s been two, 10, 44, or 60 years since we made our vows _ can say we knew all that a married life together would entail?

Riches and poverty. Sickness and health. Better and worse.

And that, in every marriage, is unavoidable.

(Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of “The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People.”)

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