Annulment is far too easy in most major nations. That strikes me as just a pernicious a scandal to the Church as priestly misconduct. In fact, it may be worse. It’s subtler and more insidious. It has become Catholic DivorceTM and misrepresents the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony to the world. What ever happened to "till death do us part"? If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
Sep 22
Another perspective:
A former philosophy professor of mine, grieved by the abundance of annulments but reluctant to question the tribunals’ decisions, has suggested that perhaps the reason there are so many is that half of Americans (and other nationalities) are simply unable to enter into a sacramental covenant in a culture where marriage’s sacred nature has been degraded, where premarital sex is glorified, where the culture of death reigns.
My parish priest has spoke about this issue before… He is of the opinion that many annulments are handed out far too easily. (Although in RCIA he gave us several examples he’d encountered of marriages that were obviously null from the beginning.)
Me, I think I agree with my pastor. If you marry someone in the church, stay with them.
BTW, I was addressing the scandal (from the Latin for “stumbling block”), not the morality of the causal acts. A sad fact of life for you: Quite often, it’s not your intentions for good or ill that hold the most influence over people, but rather the apparent or perceived nature of your intentions. Sometimes grievous sins are ignored while minor gaff causes a furor.
Given that our pre-Cana programs are often as non-Catholic (in the sense that Catholic teaching and practice are rather lacking) as they are brief, we often do not do our part in fighting society’s depraved vision of marriage. I refer to the entry on Funky’s engaged encounter retreat above.
I agree with EmilyE that people should stick with a marriage, but we sow what we reap. If bishops do not enunciate how Church teachings work in the public sphere, we should not be surprised that we have a boatload of pro-abortion Catholics complaining about why they may be denied communion in some dioceses. Likewise, if we do not tell people what a marriage is and what precisely they are getting into, we should not be surprised that marriages fall apart like they do.
I don’t like the annulment situation either, but our historically slack pastoral work is burning us.
I see Catholic divorce as having a far worse effect on the global Church than a scandal which, though it certainly involved deplorable acts, is not likely to have have a far-reaching negative impact. The most important reasons for that are the incredibly small number of priests who are actually guilty and the number of consentual homosexual relationships with older teens that were lumped in with the really bad stuff. Is it a problem? Yes. Must it be fixed and never repeated? Absolutely. Will damage the Church as extensively, in time and magnitude, as the breakdown of Catholic sexual ethics (including disrepect for the sacramentality of marriage) will? I don’t think so.
Just to give you a heads up, you just gave the anal rape of children moral superiority over getting divorced.