In 1990 Sheila Rausch Kennedy agreed to a no-fault civil divorce from her husband, Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II (D-Mass.). But a few weeks ago she announced she would contest a Catholic Church-sanctioned annulment of the marriage.
Few issues in the Roman Catholic faith stir the sort of passion, anger and confusion within its ranks as the church’s position on annulments and divorce.
A Vatican official has called the number of annulments in the U.S. church a “grave scandal.” A Gallup poll for the National Catholic Reporter magazine this month showed 38 percent of American Catholics believe Catholics should be able to decide to remarry without an annulment and without church intercession.
The same poll showed 62 percent believed themselves to be good Catholics without obeying church teachings on divorce and marriage.
The Kennedy case is typical.
In August, Rep. Kennedy, 40, eldest son of Bobby Kennedy, announced his engagement to Anne Kelly, 36, a member of his Washington staff. But unless his former marriage is annulled, they will not be able to marry in the Catholic faith.
Sheila Rausch, 43, was a willing participant in ending their 12-year marriage in a civil no-fault divorce. But she said she would fight a church annulment in deference to their twin 12-year-old sons.
“If our marriage were deemed never to have existed in the eyes of the church,” she wrote last month in Time magazine, “then our children, like others in annulled marriages, would have been neither conceived in nor born to a sanctified union.”
Church officials said that the status of children has never been affected by annulment, adding that the common misconception is a testament to the emotion circling the issue.
At one end of the spectrum are Catholic traditionalists who strongly support official church doctrine that the state has no right to end marriages (“What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder”) and that the church should not liberally grant annulments.
On the other end are those Catholics and former Catholics who believe the church should just flat out recognize and accept civil divorce among its members. They have labeled the annulment process hypocrisy, believing it makes people deny the reality of past events and feelings in their lives. Some have left the church because of that.
In between are people like Sheila Rausch Kennedy, for whom ending the legal and financial responsibilities of their marriages in a civil court is OK. But pursuing an ecclesiastical declaration that their former marriages never existed in the eyes of the church is quite another matter.
And there are hundreds of thousands of Catholics like Marilyn, a 50-year-old Chicago social worker, who literally regard annulments as God-sent.
They are the Catholics who in the last 20 years have acted on changes in canon law that have made obtaining church annulments for divorced couples easier than it used to be.
Marilyn, who asked that her full name not be used, got an annulment 12 years ago. Her 10-year marriage had ended in a civil divorce two years earlier. The mother of two daughters from the annuled union, she has never remarried. She said she never asked on what grounds the tribunal judge annulled her marriage.
“I’m blessed with a deep faith in God,” she said, “and to fail at my marriage was catastrophic beyond belief. But I also believed that I had done everything I could to save the marriage.
“I felt that if the church saw a basis for the annulment, it was like God saying to me, `Hey, Marilyn, I believe you did what you could.’ It was an affirmation from my God and my church that, `Hey, I’m OK.’ “
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In 1968, 338 American Catholic marriages were annulled by the church. In 1991, 41,121 marriage annulments were granted by Catholic churches in the U.S., by far the largest national number of the 54,137 granted that year worldwide.
In fact, the American branch of the church has of late come under heavy criticism from traditionalists at the Vatican, such as Archbishop Vincenzo Fagiolo, who in June he called the high numbers of Catholic annulments in the U.S. scandalous.
Rev. Patrick R. Lagges, adjutant judicial vicar for the Chicago archdiocesan Marriage Tribunal, said the increase in annulments is primarily due to rewriting of canon law since the Second Vatican Council.
Before the Vatican Council’s reinterpretation of canon law regarding marriage, grounds for annulment were narrow: failure to consummate the marriage, refusal of a spouse to have children, or bigamy.
The Second Vatican Council redefined how marriage tribunals could determine what constitutes a “valid bond of marriage,” examining the psychological state of the couple at the time of marriage.
“Annulment never denies the existence of a relationship,” said Lagges. “It just talks about the quality of a relationship, what it looked like, rather than the fact of it.
“I think a lot of people’s problems with annulments come from that. We’re not saying the marriage never existed. We’re talking about how it existed.”
As for the children, he said, “Church law (most recently Canon 1137) states that they are legitimate,” he said. “If a marriage is declared null, it only affects the two parties themselves and their ability to remarry in the Catholic church.”
The church is often accused, he said, of using the annulment process as a money-generating operation, charging high fees so that only the wealthy can afford it.
In fact, he said, in the Chicago archdiocese the most anyone can be charged is $850. He said some or all of that often is waived, according to the means of the person petitioning for an annulment. Many petitioners are mothers living on a single income and trying to keep their children in tuition-charging Catholic schools.
The archdiocese marriage tribunal office is an $800,000-a-year operation. Because so many cannot pay, the archdiocese subsidizes more than $200,000 of that. On average, it takes 14 months for a case to go through a decision.
About 3,000 people a year apply to the archdiocese for annulments, but 1,900 drop out before going beyond the first, cursory steps of making out an application. Another 150 drop out once the process reaches a tribunal judge.
All may go to the tribunal only after a civil divorce has been granted. Only 10 percent to 20 percent of the cases are like the Kennedy case, in which a former spouse fights an annulment request.
“For the most part,” Lagges said, “you don’t have disagreement on the cases. A lot of parties just don’t care, so long as they don’t have to do anything. We’re trying to make sure they aren’t contentious cases. We want it to be a process where people can be healed.”
Now, Lagges said, the tribunals try to understand “the motivation, the freedom. The capacity to fulfill the obligations of marriage at the time the vows were taken is what is considered.”
Among the questions officials ask: “Did they want to get married, or were they trying to escape from something else, like physical, sexual or alcoholic abuse at home? Was the decision made freely, or was something else, like premarital pregnancy, forcing the decision on them?”
Even couples who come in sure that their marriage started without a hitch often discover through questioning as they go through the process that something was amiss from the beginning, he said. But the tribunal also finds marriages that were strong at the start, he said, and cannot be granted an annulment, barring those spouses remarrying in the church.
“Not every marriage that fails was weakened from the start,” Lagges said. “Sometimes we find this was a good marriage that simply fell apart-due to human weakness or because it just ran out of gas and didn’t make it.”
He estimated that at least 90 percent of the people who stick with the process through a tribunal decision are granted annulments, because most of the weaker cases drop out before then.
A person seeking an annulment begins by filling out detailed histories of the marriage and the families of both spouses. The process is not stopped if one of the spouses does not participate.
The petitioner is assigned an advocate, a person with a degree in canon law, to represent his or her case. A defender of the bond is assigned to the case to defend the validity of the marriage. A field advocate is assigned to examine the evidence and question people who were familiar with both spouses and the marriage.
Cases are heard mostly by one judge, a priest. Some complex cases are presided over by a three-judge panel, which can include nuns or laymen, all of whom have doctorate degrees in canon law. Proceedings are held at tribunal offices at 155 E. Superior St.
Judges call in spouses, witnesses and consulting psychologists for questioning. Once a decision has been rendered, it is sent on to a three-judge panel for review.
Traditionalists believe the American church has caved in to societal pressure by liberally granting annulments in an era of high divorce rates.
“All of this (canon law revisions) is relatively new,” Lagges said, “and we’re still trying to figure out ways to apply them. If (Vatican critics) are concerned with some of our procedures, then we revise some of our procedures.”
Marilyn, the social worker who got an annulment 12 years ago, said she found the process so comforting that she became an annulment field advocate three years ago.
“God is a forgiving God,” she said. “People need to be given a second chance. If the church can’t be a caring, understanding church, the world will be in much worse shape.”