Pope Francis tells priests to embrace divorced and remarried Catholics
The history of annulments goes back centuries to when marriage became a contract
By Tim Townsend
Last fall, Pope Francis made a fairly quiet but radical move to help divorced Catholics around the world. In an effort at what he’s called “mercy,” Francis removed some bureaucratic rules, making it easier for Catholics to remarry.
On Friday, the Vatican released a teaching document about family, called Amoris Laetitia, or The Joy of Love, written by Francis after two years of debate and discussion with the world’s bishops. In it, he seemed to open a pathway for divorced and remarried Catholics to participate in a foundational and central ritual of the faith that they don’t currently have access to — holy communion.
It’s a moment church conservatives have agonized over as the pope puts his stamp on the future of Catholic marriage. The church considers marriage a sacrament, permanent and indissoluble by anyone but God. In the words from the book of Mark that are often read at weddings, “the two shall become one flesh … therefore what God has joined together, no human being must separate.”
Catholic teaching doesn’t recognize civil divorce. Instead, the church offers a centuries-old Catholic legal maneuver that allows remarriage: annulment, or in the church’s parlance, “declaration of nullity.”
Through an often drawn-out, expensive and invasive legal process, church lawyers can declare a marriage invalid because the knot should never have been tied to begin with. A marriage can be annulled because, as defined by church law, it never really happened.
“The idea of annulment is a recognition there was something fundamentally flawed about the marriage in question,” said the Rev. John Beal, a professor of canon law at Catholic University of America.
Secular law also recognizes marriage annulments, but because divorce is so much easier, they’re rare. Prominent annulments feature famous people getting lit and then married in Las Vegas — and then regretting it. In 1998, Carmen Electra and Dennis Rodman annulled their marriage after nine days. In 2004, Britney Spears went on a Vegas bender and married her childhood friend for 55 hours before getting an annulment.
American Catholics make up less than 10% of the global Catholic church, yet between 40% and 60% of the world’s annulments are granted in the US. And according to researchers at Georgetown University, 28% of American Catholic adults who have ever married are divorced, but only 15% of those go through the annulment process. (Divorce rates and annulment rates have dropped in recent years as fewer people get married to begin with.)
The biggest problems for civilly divorced Catholics involve theological technicalities. Divorced Catholics can’t remarry in the church without an annulment, and if they remarry anyway in a civil ceremony, the church sees that marriage as adulterous. And, crucially, that person isn’t able to receive communion.
As long as marriage has existed, marriages have ended. But before the 13th century, the language used to describe those endings included dissolution and dispensation. As marriages themselves became defined as binding contracts in the 1200s (they’re still defined that way today) the idea of nullifying those contracts wasn’t far behind.
The church can claim a marriage never was because it defines marriage in detailed, particular terms. If any of those terms are judged to have been missing to begin with, a church court can annul the marriage.
A valid reason for an annulment could be that the couple wasn’t married by a priest. Or that one member of the couple was secretly already married (even if civilly divorced). Or one member of the couple had some kind of psychological condition that prevented him or her from consenting to the marriage.
Catholics point out that such conditions have been around since Jesus’ time. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells the woman at the well that if she’s had five husbands, her current one doesn’t count. And in his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul calls out the community for allowing a man to live with his father’s wife.
In perhaps history’s most famous annulment, King Henry VIII of England managed to wriggle out of his first marriage, to Catherine of Aragon, by reminding the pope that she had previously been married to Henry’s older brother Arthur for five months (they were both 15) before Arthur’s death.
After 18 years of marriage, with no male heirs to show for it, Henry wanted out. He argued, despite Catherine’s protest to the contrary, that her marriage to Arthur had been consummated, and that the pope had been wrong to grant a dispensation for him to marry Catherine in the first place (because he’d been Catherine’s brother-in-law).
But Pope Clement VII wasn’t having it. Instead, the Archbishop of Canterbury defied Rome and declared the marriage annulled so that Henry could marry the yet-to-be-beheaded Anne Boleyn, all of which would lead to the establishment of the Church of England.
Annulments aren’t quite as difficult to secure these days, but some bishops, notably in Germany, would like to make the process even easier so that divorced Catholics can get on with their lives.
Since the 1990s, the German theologian Cardinal Walter Kasper has been a champion of finding an alternative way around annulments, which can take years and cost thousands of dollars. At a global meeting of bishops at the Vatican in 2014, his proposal did not get enough votes to become a reality.
Liberal Catholics had hoped Pope Francis would include a version of the Kasper proposal in Amoris Laetitia. Conservative Catholics have said such a move would have amounted to heresy. Francis has largely left it up to individual priests to interpret his new instructions.
“A pastor cannot feel that it is enough to simply apply moral laws to those living in ‘irregular’ situations, as if they were stones to throw at people’s lives,” he wrote.
While trying to make sure divorced Catholics feel more welcome, Francis also refused to alter church doctrine.
“This is the the struggle the church is having today,” said Beal. “The church has to find a way to be faithful to what Jesus said while being pastoral and compassionate to those who’ve fallen short.”
