Audio only:
Joe examines the practice of Catholic Annulments and examines whether it’s just divorce under another name.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And today I want to explore a question that many people have. For a great number of people, the chief difficulty they have in embracing Catholicism isn’t about a major theological controversy or a doctrinal issue so much as it is a case involving the complicated issues of marriage and relationships in their own life. Because it’s not uncommon that when people are looking into the Catholic church, the question that they’re facing involves a possible need for an annulment of a prior presumed marriage. And look, if you believe that God wants you to be Catholic and then hear from the Catholic church that they think your marriage is invalid or that you’re being asked to live as brother and sister or to separate from the person you’ve regarded as your wife, that’s a large pill to swallow. And frequently the advice given is just get an annulment.
But that attitude of kind of the automatic annulment leads me to ask, well, the church has what looks on paper like a very strong teaching on marriage. In practice, don’t we often find annulments treated as Catholic divorce? Now, I think that charge is particularly relevant in the context of American Catholicism. A 2011 Catholic World Report article described America as annulment nation, noting that while fewer than 6% of the world’s Catholics are American, Americans make up a full 60% of declarations of nulity. Now that’s from 2007. So 20 years ago at least, American Catholics were 10 times as likely to have a marriage annuled as the ordinary non-American Catholic. The numbers have seemed to have improved a bit since then, but Americans are still massively overrepresented. And once more, about 90% of annulment petitions in America get approved. Now admittedly, this number again is a little bit skewed because diocese will often not even begin a petition process unless they already think there are good grounds for annulment.
But even if you add the caveats there, the things may not be quite as extreme as the numbers initially suggest, but the allegation overall seems fair. Annulments in the US look pretty easy to get. So is this just Catholic divorce? And if so, does it undermine Christian teaching on marriage? I think the answer in part is yes. I think it’s a good objection and one that’s worth taking very seriously. So I thought today it might be worth exploring that answer in two parts. First, looking at why the church has such a high moral teaching on marriage and why that bar is so high in the first place and why it requires something like annulments to happen. Why not just say, why don’t we just get divorced and remarried? And second, I want to look at some of the real problems we faced with annulments and how they can easily become a sort of Catholic divorce when coupled with a false version of mercy.
I’m then going to close with a little bit of counsel for everyone involved, whether you’re a person seeking an annulment or struggling with the granting of an annulment that you think shouldn’t have been given, or even a priest working in a tribunal handling annulment cases. Now, I’m not qualified to give that last bit of advice, so I want to turn to share some of the great advice given both by Pope Leo and prior popes on exactly this question. But before I get there, let’s start with that first point. Why does the church have a high moral bar on marriage? Well, ultimately, because Jesus had a high moral bar on marriage. This is an area where I think one of the greatest scandals is not about annulments being Catholic divorce. It’s about so many Christians being comfortable with actual divorce and remarriage in a way that is completely contrary to Christian teaching and the gospel.
You see this for one in the divorce and remarriage rates. Now, it’s true. They’re not quite as bad as the secular world, but you’d expect some massive difference between the rates of divorce and remarriage among Christians and non-Christians. But all too often, we find that the rates are too close for comfort. So the teaching on divorce and remarriage that Jesus gives is that if a man divorces his wife and marries another, he’s committing adultery. As Jesus says in Mark 10, whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. We find that exact same teaching on Jesus’s lips in Luke 16. And it’s the same teaching that we find St. Paul proclaiming in one Corinthians seven. You may not divorce. And if you do separate, you’re required either to reunite or else to live celibately.
You are not free to remarry because to do so would be to commit adultery. In the mid 100s, St. Justin Martyr sums up Christ’s teaching on chastity by saying that all who by human law are twice married are in the eyes of our master sinners, as are those who look upon a woman to lust after her. And Justin Martyr isn’t alone. Henry Cruzell’s comprehensive study of the first five centuries of Christian writings found that with one exception, every church father agreed that divorce and remarriage were always forbidden without any exceptions. Now, needless to say, that’s a high moral bar. In fact, when the apostles hear this, they respond by saying, if such is the case for a man of his wife, it is not expedient to marry. They recognize that Jesus is actually going far beyond the mosaic law found in the Old Testament. And they recognize this because Jesus tells us that he’s doing so.
He acknowledged that the mosaic law permitted divorce in some circumstances. For the hardness of your heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning, it was not so. So it’s important to recognize both that there’s a high bar in Jesus’ teaching on marriage, but also why? And the why is pretty simple. Man and woman become one flesh in marriage. And what therefore God has joined together? Let not man put us under. The state is not the one who makes you and your spouse one flesh. God is. And so neither the state nor any human power is able to undo what God does. So it’s not just that you shouldn’t undo your marriage, it’s that you literally can’t. Now, if you understand these points, then you should understand three things. First, if God united you and your spouse, divorce and remarriage are not just undesirable.
They’re completely unacceptable. And in a real way, they’re impossible. What you describe as divorce and remarriage is regarded in the eyes of our master simply as sin and adultery. Second, this explains a curious quirk we find in Matthew 19, because there we find the exact same teaching from Jesus prohibiting divorce and remarriage. But this time there’s this curious language except for, and then the Greek word there is pornea, except for pornea. Now, pornea is the root of pornography. It’s a word that is often translated as harlatry or even better fornication. Now, it’s sometimes misread as Christians, as if Jesus is permitting divorce and remarriage in the case of adultery or in the case where one of the two spouses is sexually immoral in some way. Jesus says that if you divorce and remarry, you commit adultery. And the Greek word for adultery is used there.
But when he says, except for pornea, there’s actually a different Greek word being used. So Matthew is clearly signaling that Jesus is not talking about adultery right now. Plus, if you read it as if there’s an exception clause in Matthew, then you can in fact separate what God is doing together in the case of adultery or in the case of some other sexual sin. Then Jesus and Matthew is contradicting the point he’s just made about how we’re not able to do that. And this also creates a biblical contradiction because Jesus and Matthew would be contradicting the much higher moral bar of Jesus and Mark and Luke. And he’d be contradicting what St. Paul teaches as Christian teaching in one Corinthians. But it turns out there’s actually an easy answer to this objection. Pornea is a typical word used for fornication, not the typical word used for adultery.
So when the Bible is translated into the Latin vulgate, this Greek word gets translated as fornicatsio. And in fact, it’s translated into English and the KJV as fornication all 26 times that it appears. And why does that matter? Because fornication involves sexual relations between people who are not married. In other words, Jesus is not giving a permission slip to get divorced and remarried if your spouse wrongs you by cheating on you or committing some other kind of sexual sin. Rather, he’s saying that what he’s just taught about divorce and remarriage only applies to true marriages, not to sham marriages. Because remember, just as there are sham marriages today, think for example of so-called gay marriages. There were sham marriages back then. For example, Gentiles marrying people who were close relatives, unions that the Jews regarded as incestuous. And the Jews would refer to those unions as pornea because the idea is those people might claim that they’re married, but they’re really just fornicating.
So to put the issue very practically, if you convert to Christianity and you realize that what you though was a marriage was really in the eyes of God, a sham marriage, Jesus is not telling you you’re forced to stay in your fornication. No, you can and should divorce in that case. Well, right in that way, Jesus’ teaching in Matthew harmonizes perfectly with his teaching in Mark and Luke, with St. Paul’s teaching in one Corinthians, and with the virtually universal Christian understanding of divorce and remarriage, really in the first millennium and a half before the reformation. So the so-called exception clause in Matthew is really just Jesus pointing out that his teaching only applies if God has joined the two of you together as one. That then is going to lead to a third observation because if you understand both what Jesus is saying, no divorce and remarriage, and why what God has doing together, man can’t separate, then there’s an important question we’re left with.
How do we know if these two people are really joined together as one in marriage? How do we know if God has joined them together or if it was merely the union of the state or of two individuals without divine sanction? And it’s that question that we’re really exploring when we look at an annulment, because clearly there are sham marriages. Take an easy case. You go to church, you say your vows, you believe you’re married, but then five years later you discovered the person you thought you were married to this whole time has secretly been married to somebody else. Well, has God joined the two of you together? Seemingly not. After all, your spouse seems to be joined together as somebody else’s spouse. But given human sin, those easy cases can get a lot more complicated. Maybe your spouse was in a Vegas wedding at 18 and they were drunk.
Did that first attempt at marriage count? Or does their second sober attempt at marriage or neither? So there’s a need for somebody and ideally somebody objective to sort these complicated questions out. So the whole idea behind having church tribunals investigating these issues is to provide a neutral forum to help people to untangle the message that we make through sin and to figure out who is really married in the eyes of God to whom. Given this, annulments and annulment tribunals and all of that are a good thing, but they’re not without their problems. So what are those problems? Well, several things. First, they are merely human judgments. Think about it like this. It is a matter of divine law that we do not steal. But when you have to get into the nitty gritty of who owns a certain property, sometimes those disputes can become really complicated.
And they’re sorted out not by both sides just reading the 10 commandments, but by sometimes in depth factual and legal analyses and those human judgments can sometimes fall short. Well, similarly, when we’re living out the law of God on marriage, there can be complicated factual and legal questions and there can be disputes. I want to take an extreme example. What if your spouse disappears? They get lost at sea or they go out to get the milk and never return. Maybe they’ve abandoned you. Maybe they’re alive but they’re kidnapped somewhere or they’re stranded on the desert island. In those cases, you’re still married. You’re not free to remarry. You have a living spouse. But on the other hand, maybe something horrible happened and they died. In that case, you actually are free to remarry. Well, how do you move forward? Amazingly, Canyon Law actually has a process to handle those kind of cases.
But let’s take a more likely case. What if your relationship simply falls apart and one of you claims and seems to believe the marriage was a sham from the start, but the other one insists, no, it’s really a true marriage. Well, once again, it’s not like you can just look at a chapter or verse in the Bible that’s going to just settle the question in most of these cases. Instead, it’s going to often involve sorting through a pile of facts. And in the midst of that, you often have one person who wants an annulment, another who doesn’t, and maybe some kids who have strong feelings about the matter as well. And unfortunately in cases like that, the parties don’t always tell the truth. After all, you’re dealing with people whose relationship is broken down, who may have just been through a messy divorce, and who may want to manipulate the church into okaying their new relationship with somebody else.
And particularly if this is the last hurdle somebody is facing before they’re ready to enter the church and become Catholic, another problem can enter the equation as well. There can be a strong desire on the part of well-intended priests in the tribunal to be pastoral and to just declare the marriage null even if the facts suggest otherwise. And as we’re going to see, there’s actually a twofold problem with that. First, it’s contrary to the truth. And second, it’s a false mercy because the mercy that you end up trying to show to one person ends up being a cruelty to their abandoned spouse or their children in many of these cases. Now, frequently, this doesn’t involve a tribunal intentionally distorting the truth, just kind of erring on the side of granting annulments even on flimsy evidence. And I’d suggest that if you give into that false mercy, you do end up undermining Christ’s teaching on marriage.
Just as you would undermine Christ’s teaching on theft, if you kind of assumed every handbag in the store probably belonged to you. So I want to offer a few kind of concrete thoughts here in closing. First, if you are somebody going through the annulment process and you find it frustrating right now, I understand. It can be long. There can be a lot of paperwork and the outcome is often uncertain and may not go the way you want it to go. Well, to avoid a spirit of resentment, I think it can help to remember what’s at the root of all of this, that we take seriously Jesus’s words on marriage. And we believe that when you make a promise before God, that you’re going to be married to someone until death do you part, that you’re bound by that. If God responds to your vows by joining you two in marriage, we can’t undo that.
We don’t want to try. Now, of course, we don’t want to rashly assume that he didn’t unite you two in marriage. So if we declare that that’s null, it’s something that should be done only carefully with a thorough examination. So be patient with the process. Second, remember the annulment process is only as good as the people involved. If you and your spouse or the witnesses are just dishonest, you lie. There’s no infallibility that ties to the decision of a tribunal. They might just render a bad decision. Just like if you go to court and you lie on the stand in a secular court, you might get the court to make the wrong decision. So I’d really encourage you to strive to be painfully honest, even if it’s not convenient. And if you believe that you are not free to remarry in the eyes of God, if you are convinced in conscience, no, I know that there was a real marriage.
Don’t remarry. Even if you’ve got an annulment on paper, because you know God will not be deceived. Third, while as I said, I’m not qualified to give counsel to the priests on the tribunals. I’ve never sat on a tribunal and I’m not a priest. There have been several recent statements from popes on the need for tribunals to really cut it out with this false mercy. Both Benedict XVI and St. John Paul II decried the scandal of seeing the value of Christian marriage being destroyed in practice by the exaggerated and almost automatic multiplication of declarations of nolity and cases of failure of marriage on the pretext of some immaturity or psychic weakness on the part of the contracting parties. So if you are a priest or if you’re part of a tribunal that is regularly granting annulments on those bases, the popes are saying cut it out.
And honestly, Pope Leo has some of the best counsel on the subject that I’ve seen. He pointed out that true justice and true charity are not opposed. They’re instead intrinsically united. And he warned that misunderstood compassion, even if apparently motivated by Pastor Olseal, actually undermines the truth. The decisions of a tribunal, both in annulment cases and otherwise, must be based on a solid objective foundation. Now that said, he also reminds tribunals as well that there can be at times a cold and detached affirmation of the truth that doesn’t take into account all that love for people requires. Omitting those concerns dictated by respect and mercy, which must be present in all stages of a proceeding. So don’t treat people coldly and legalistically, but accompany them pastorally and with great respect and mercy. Just don’t do so in a way that pits charity against truth. Or as he said on another occasion, it is true that in God’s judgment on salvation, his forgiveness of the repentant sinner is always at work.
But human judgment on the nolity of marriage cannot, however, be manipulated by false mercy. Any activity contrary to the service of the process of truth must certainly be deemed unjust. On the other hand, it is precisely in the proper exercise of judicial authority that true mercy must be established. In the King James version of Psalm 85, we read that mercy and truth are met together. Righteousness and peace have kissed each other. That’s the call of every tribunal, everyone working for a tribunal, and honestly of every action that we do as Christians to speak the truth in love, not sacrificing truth for the sake of a false mercy, nor sacrificing the warmth of charity for cold, hard facts. And it’s only in pursuing that union of mercy and truth that we are able to avoid the scandal of treating annulments like Catholic divorce. Now, if you want more on the radical nature of Jesus’ teaching about marriage and why we know that there is no such thing as an adultery exception, I urge you to check out this longer video that I did on the subject.
For Shemma’s Popri, I’m Joe Heshmeyer. God bless you. I