At one of the last Law School reunions I attended I had a discussion about annulment of marriages in the Catholic Church. It was with Jim Keating, then a deputy Attorney General for the State of New Jersey. Jim had recently been divorced, as I had, after some 20 years of marriage and incidentally was also the father of seven children. He inquired if I was also seeking an annulment, as he had. I told him I was not doing so. It, I opined, seemed a bit awkward, to say the least, to annul seven children and twenty-two years of a relationship. He showed some minor surprise in that he had done the opposite. He advised that he had obtained an annulment in the diocese of the Bronx, New York. I was confused and it must have shown. I knew he was employed by the State of New Jersey and assumed he lived there, he acknowledges, he did. He explained that the Bronx was the “forum of convenience”, that is, he chose that diocese because of its relaxed requirements and it was comparatively cheap. He had made a survey of the matter and he offered me the wisdom of his search: “Well, if you ever decide to go for one, this is the diocese to use!” He added that local counsel easily handled the resident requirement. I thanked him for his advice but declined his offer of help.
Later, after mentioning this to Father Jim, he sent me a book in preparation (still in paper form) written by a (canon) lawyer in Michigan. It contained information about most of the dioceses in U.S. and their requirements for annulments. It made a table of comparisons from severely limited grounds for granting an annulment to the most liberal grounds. It, also, if I remember correctly, gave an estimated cost of the same and its residential requirements. It seemed to be what Jim Keating had done on his own.
All of these remembrances were recalled because of a book reviewed recently in the N.Y. Times Book Review. It was a review of a book written by the ex-Mrs. Joseph Kennedy. Joe is the eldest of Bob Kennedy’s children and is a congressman from Massachusetts. Joe and his wife were divorced after 12 years of marriage, which produced twins.
Joe has obtained an annulment. The book arose from his ex’s appeal to the Vatican in objection to that annulment. It is a blast at the Church’s practice of granting annulments more than an attack on the marriage or Joe.
The ex-Mrs Kennedy is Shelia Rauch Kennedy. She refers to the American Catholic Church as the “Nevada of the Roman Church” The book is entitled” Shattered Faith” but the reviewer, Christopher Lydon, captions his review: “A Woman Scorned”! She contends that the practice in U.S. is an “elaborate pretense” while holding a technical line against “Divorce”. “The policy…is a fraud, a tissue of lies about religion…a hoax that is particularly cruel to dutiful Catholic wives…”
She notes that one of the grounds for granting an annulment is “lack of due discretion”. This is a code phrase for a multitude of hindsight flaws. It has allowed the proceedings to become infected with analysis by “psychological consultants” who on the strength of an hour’s (or less) interview will issue opinions about the mental state of the marriage partner years earlier. It is therefore no wonder that a church canon lawyer could brag: “There isn’t a marriage in America, that we can’t annul!”
Some paradoxes alluded to by the authoress: The hypocrisy of having “support groups” for divorcees yet not recognizing divorce; the priest, though a known, and even convicted sex offenders, still remains a priest, i.e., the sacrament of Holy Orders is not dissolved nor annulled; Catholics who marry members of the Jewish faith in their ceremony do not lose the privileges of the sacraments in the church; the marriage is recognized as a “valid” but not sacramental marriage. However, the most damning charge is a summary by the reviewer:
“If the sacrament of marriage can be undone on the grounds of neurotic tendencies among the partners–if sacraments can be erased on any finding short of force, fraud, the gravest misunderstandings or a clear sign from God –surely the church has abandoned the principle that it is God’s own grace that makes the union, not merely the designs of men and women whose inescapable flaws make every human act vulnerable to ultimate inspection”
She has a solution. You get one crack at a “sanctified” marriage and if you “blow it” the new marriage can be recognized as “valid”, but we won’t say your prior marriage never existed! The church should draw a distinction between “valid” and “sacramental” marriages here as it does elsewhere. Amen.
Then there are those “reasonable men” who would simply say: ”When you entered the contract, took vows, you did it knowingly and voluntarily, ergo you knew a “divorce” meant loss of membership in the club. Unless of course now you want to make believe that you were somehow duped into making that contract so it should be dissolved.
There is no question that the “ex-Mrs.K” presents a severely damaging analysis of the annulment practices in the church in America. It puts it right up there with its practice regarding women and holy orders; the sexual orientation of it’s members, etc. etc. I would love to see what the Vatican does with regard to her appeal!
Time is drawing us closer to our departure. Today is June’s Birthday (6/29) and we are having an “open house” at 7435 Dorcas for everyone but the owners – they are asked not to be here. This time last year we watched the whales respond in grand fashion for June’s day. So maybe we will be as lucky today with Buyers…I can report now as I type this…we have four deals being put forth…no agreement though as of today (6/30).
Did you ever wonder? The 30th of June is the end of the fiscal year; tomorrow begins a “New” fiscal “Year” – but nobody celebrates it with New Year’s Parties – hmmm. I suppose it’s being concerned about the deficit that makes partying a bit out of place, no?
One of my new PC games is “Latin I”, played by declining nouns and conjugating verbs…(just what ever household needs). I was demonstrating it to June when popped the “eternal” question: “What good is it to learn Latin? You can’t use it to talk to anyone?” Ah yes! What good is it? What use is it? An” All-American” question never easily answered. One could be: It’s fun. I enjoy testing my memory and solving the puzzle, i.e., the translation, like crosswords. Another is: It is tried again with a bit of nostalgia for that time some 50 years ago when I could read the language, in some form, after six years of study. It reminds me of those times and I’d like to see if I could resurrect some of that proficiency.
The thoughts of its being “good” or “useful” reminded me of part in the book I’ve been reading by Kathleen Norris, called “The Cloister Walk “in a chapter entitled “Degenerates”. Kathleen Norris is a poet who became a Benedictine oblate (associate) even though not a Catholic nor previously church oriented. She lived for periods of up to nine months at a time in monasteries following the rule and living the liturgy. In the Degenerates chapter she talks about the usefulness of poets and monks. She compares them:
“I told the monks that I had come to see both writing and monasticism as vocations that require periods of apprenticeship and formation. Prodigies are common in mathematics, but extremely rare in literature, and…’As far as I know there are no prodigies in monastic life’…
Poets and monks do have a communal role in American culture, which alternately ignores, romanticizes, and despises them. In our relentlessly utilitarian society, structuring life around writing is as crazy as structuring a life around prayer, yet that is what writers and monks do. Deep down, people seem glad to know that monks are praying, that poets are writing poems…I regard monks and poets as the best degenerates in America. Both have a finely developed sense of the sacred potential in all things; both value image and symbol over utilitarian purpose or the bottom line; they recognize the transformation powers hiding in the simplest things, and it leads them to commit absurd acts: the poem, the prayer, what nonsense!
In a culture that excels at creating artificial, tightly controlled environments (shopping malls, amusement parks, chain motels), the art of monks and poets is useless, if not irresponsible, remaining out of reach of commercial manipulation and ideological justification.” (Wish I could write like that!)
Please, I don’t intend to infer that my playing with Latin in any way rises to what poets and monks do, but it was such a strange Coincidence to be reading this at a time when the question arose as to what good is this or that discipline that has no “bottom line”.
Vive! Vale! (Enjoy & Farewell)