Marriage annulment cases

A NEW Vatican document should be very interesting to us. It's entitled "Dignitas connubii" (Dignity of marriage), and is a handbook or manual to help Church tribunals handle cases of marriage annulment more effectively.

Truth is marriage-related problems are exploding in many places today. That's actually an understatement, and is really a sad and painful fact to bear.

Of course, when love itself is in crisis, marriage and family life cannot be far behind. Thing is many people are losing sight of the true nature of love. They play around with it, so what can you expect but problems and troubles to come?

What kind of love is it, for example, when it confines itself only to the feel-good, to the sensual and the sexual, and is blind to the unavoidable ingredients of suffering and pain?

What kind of love is it when it is claimed to have died out because a spouse falls sick and cannot anymore carry on normal marital relations?

What kind of love is it that does not know the idea of a lifelong commitment whatever the circumstance?

With the recent orgiastic frenzy involved in the celebration of Valentine's, it is feared that again the caricatures and dangerous portrayals of love are being preached and promoted. Poor young people and the weak who easily fall victim!
Compounding the whole mess is the mistaken idea, quite widespread, that a failed marriage is automatically a ground for annulment.

No sir! Annulment cases simply involve the verification that there was no marriage in the first place, in spite of the ceremonies, because of certain reasons like impediments, consensual incapacity, formal defects, etc.

Anyway, we may have our own personal idea of how bad the situation is, but a recent Church report has put some numbers to this development. It's truly worrying, to say the least!

For year 2002 alone, there were reported to be 56,236 cases of marriage annulment heard, of which 46,092 or 82% were given the affirmative sentence. Of these, 64% came from the U.S. and Canada, and 18% from Europe.

The rest of the American continent accounted for 13.5 %, Asia, 3%, Oceania, 1.5% and Africa, 0.7%

Many factors can be involved behind these statistics. One churchmen say that there is "widespread secularization that entails mistaken conceptions of marriage in relation to the ideal proposed by the Church."

In short, many do not understand what marriage really is, and this may be because they are affected by a paganized way of life, Godless and immoral.

Another factor put forward is the alleged greater understanding of human psychology that would now make it easier to prove cases of consensual incapacity, etc.

This is a very delicate point, and is prone to a lot of abuses and manipulations. That's why the Holy Father for years has been warning us about these possibilities. It's one strong reason why the document was made.

Still another explanation is what some people term as a "matter of conscience." It involves people in irregular status, people who may have obtained civil divorce, but now want to remarry but cannot unless the previous marriage is declared null.

The document also seeks to give relief to those who find great difficulty in seeking a declaration of nullity of marriage in spite of valid grounds for it.

There is the perception that filing for annulment is only for the rich. The Vatican wants to correct that perception.

Another problem, especially hounding the Philippine Church, is the lack of trained canon lawyers to staff the tribunals, let alone help people in their cases. We need to pray a lot that there be people, priests or lay, who can get interested in canon law.

These factors could be the reason there's great discrepancy between the number of annulment cases in developed countries like the US and Europe and the number of those in Asia and Africa.

The thing is that we need to squarely face this festering problem we have in our midst. We cannot and should not ignore it.