(RNS1-JULY14) Sister Claire Lapointe counsels Roman Catholics in Springfield, Mass., about the
church’s rules on marriage annulments. See RNS-CATHOLIC-ANNUL, transmitted July 14, 2006.
Religion News Service photo by Michael S. Gordon/The Republican.

ST. LOUIS (RNS) Mary Beth Erickson’s husband was not in court during their divorce proceedings in 1990. There was no testimony. She didn’t get to give her side of the story.

After the divorce was finalized, she felt unsatisfied. Added to the pain of the separation was the feeling that something had been left unsaid.

Erickson wasn’t interested in remarrying yet, but she sought an annulment from the Roman Catholic church anyway.

In court, “I didn’t have a chance to say what happened,” Erickson said. “The annulment offered me a way to do that and get past it. It was a form of healing.”

Erickson, a parish-center administrator at St. Francis Xavier College Church in St. Louis, found that healing to be so profound that she now volunteers as one of 250 advocates whom the archdiocese has trained to guide Catholics seeking annulments through the yearlong process.

“They’re sharing information that was so intimate in their lives with people they’ve never met with, and that’s really scary,” Erickson said. “You’re saying stuff you’ve never said to anyone.”

American Catholics are seeking annulments — the church’s declaration a marriage was invalid — in large numbers. Whether they’re hoping it helps them heal after a divorce, or allows them to get remarried in the church, annulments are in demand, and the church in the United States is granting them.

The St. Louis Archdiocese granted nine out of 10 requests for an annulment last year. American Catholics make up about 6 percent of the global church, but according to the most recent Vatican statistics available, they received 60 percent of the world’s annulments in 2006.

Pope Benedict XVI has indicated he believes that’s too many, and some Vatican watchers say the church may decrease the number of annulments granted to divorced Catholics.

In a speech in January to the Roman Rota, the Vatican’s highest appellate court, Benedict reiterated the church’s teaching on invalidating Catholic marriages, emphasizing the need to balance “justice” and “charity.” He also cautioned church tribunals against allowing the growing civil divorce rate to dictate the number of annulments they grant.

Even after a Catholic couple gets a divorce, the church still considers the marriage valid. An annulment is a tribunal’s declaration a marriage was never valid to begin with, that there was a hidden impediment or “defect of consent” that kept the marriage from being legitimate.

That declaration comes only after a long and involved investigation that asks people to examine, in sometimes excruciating detail, the ups and downs of their marriage. The tribunal may conduct interviews with both parties, ask for details from friends and family members, search for documentary evidence of marital wrongdoing and order psychiatric evaluations.

Most Catholics who seek an annulment do so in order to remarry in the church. Divorced Catholics without an annulment who remarry outside the church are barred from receiving Communion because the church considers that marriage irregular. In his January speech, Benedict argued that the desire to be both remarried and able to receive the Eucharist should not come at the cost of the sacrament of marriage.

“Both justice and charity require love for truth, and essentially involve the search for what is true,” Benedict said. “Without truth, charity slides into sentimentalism. Love becomes an empty shell to be filled arbitrarily. This is the fatal risk of love in a culture without truth.”

The pope’s speech went to the heart of a pastoral challenge for church leaders presented with faithful Catholics in unhappy marriages: how to allow an individual Catholic another chance at marriage in the church (charity), while upholding the church’s belief in the permanence of marriage (justice).

The speech may have also served as a subtle warning to the world’s tribunals, especially those in the U.S., that change could be coming.

Every Catholic diocese has a tribunal, and most of its members’ time is spent investigating troubled marriages. Each tribunal reports its annulment numbers annually to the Apostolic Signatura, often called the Vatican’s supreme court, now headed by former St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke.

If Benedict wanted the church to scale back the number of annulments it grants, for instance, that message could be sent around the Catholic world through Burke’s office.

“It certainly could,” said the Rev. John Beal, a professor of canon law at Catholic University of America in Washington. “By making it clear that in the review process, certain things are going beyond the bounds of law and have to stop.”

The U.S. leads the world in divorces, according to the U.S. Census, which partially explains why the Catholic church here leads the world in annulments.

Monsignor John Shamleffer, who heads the St. Louis Archdiocese’s tribunal, said Benedict was “reminding tribunals not to fall prey to the direction of society.”

“You can’t just (grant annulments) because you know that’s what people want,” Shamleffer explained. “That decision has to be based on real understanding.”

(Tim Townsend writes for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in St. Louis, Mo.)