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By Robert H. Vasoli
The hot controversy over Joe Kennedy's annulment gave just a glimpse of yank Catholicism's open mystery: that opposite to reputable Catholic doctrine, American church buildings provide annulments wholesale, freely mentioning marriages nonexistent in order that one or either companions can remarry within the church. the U.S. is domestic to just 6% of the world's Catholics, Robert Vasoli issues out, however it now bills for seventy five% of all Church annulments, two-thirds of that are granted on ostensibly mental grounds. the genuine scandal, although, isn't really easily the numbers, yet that Church marriage courts annul hundreds of thousands of marriages which are really legitimate in response to Catholic instructing. Drawing on huge examine, the writer information accurately how those courts allow divorced Catholics--and many non-Catholics as well--bypass Catholic educating and legislations. He indicates, for example, how they generally aid petitioners manufacture grounds for annulment, that are justified with specious mental reasoning which are counter to the letter and spirit of canon legislations. certainly, it can also be alleged that "lack of emotional adulthood" on the time of the marriage can invalidate marriages that experience lasted 30 years. the end result has been a tidal wave: in 1968, the yank church granted fewer than six hundred annulments; this day it palms out greater than 60,000 a 12 months. yet Rome has no longer smiled at the functionality of U.S. tribunals: of these mental annulments appealed to the Roman Rota (the Vatican's maximum marriage tribunal), greater than ninety% are overturned. This revealing examine annulment weaves painstaking research with a wealth of facts because it illuminates the measure to which the U.S. Church has long gone its personal manner in view that Vatican II on what constitutes legitimate marriage.
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Additional info for What God Has Joined Together: The Annulment Crisis in American Catholicism
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But doctrine has pastoral and administrative implications, and Church history is replete with disparities between word and deed. Doctrinal absolutes have at one time or another been relativized, treated as mere ideals, or targets of dissent, and regarded as being expressions of long-defunct cultural forces. " It has functioned as a multipurpose deus ex machina, a broad and nebulous rationale for the Church's need to strike out in new directions. As regards annulment, it gave new life to old murmurings, offering theologians and canonists apparent license to soften what the Council Fathers really said about indissolubility.
The new expectation, however, entailed making Rome bend to the will of its constituents, the People of God. Undeniably preConciliar Catholicism in the United States had its fair share of imperfections. But in terms of an array of objective criteria it was in much better shape than the Church in most other societies. Church attendance was high, vocations plentiful, dissent minimal, conversions to the faith frequent, and the educational Winds of Change / 19 system the envy of the rest of the Catholic world.
As will be shown below, leading American canonists have indulged their legalism to vitiate or even defy the wishes and instructions of the Church's highest courts and of the Holy Father himself. At all events, legalism within the American tribunal system clearly operates in the service of maximizing the number of decrees of nullity. 34 / What God Has Joined Together Contract versus Covenant As we have seen, the Council Fathers are credited with pronouncing marriage a covenant rather than a contract.