Why we can’t just annul annulment

 Is Big Blue Big Brother?

& Book Reviews &

Mainline churches committing suicide

A how-to book on Catholic parenting

Pearl of York: A play with the young in mind

Why we can’t just annul annulment

With Sheila Rauch Kennedy, ex-wife of Massachusetts Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II, making the rounds of talk shows, the Catholic annulment process has becomes everyone’s favorite whipping boy.

But the process has never won popularity contests.

Patricia Bardon Cadigan explained her resentment in an essay in The New York Times Magazine, on Aug. 21, 1994:

"Catholic marriage used to last forever, even beyond the grave. Now, church officials actively encourage divorced Catholics to seek annulments. In many cases, the person seeking the annulment wants to remarry in the Church. In this country alone, tribunals invalidate more than 60,000 marriages each year; the number is increasing. Annulments are sought in the best of Catholic families: the Kennedys, the Grimaldis, the Giulianis."

The real truth about annulment is that one cannot understand the process or the concept if one does not understand the Sacrament of Marriage.

THE CHILDREN ARE LEGITIMATE

Sheila Kennedy, an Anglican, is mad as hops. She says that annulment makes her two children look like . . . you know. And she adds that the criteria for annulment – that either she or Joe didn’t know what they were doing when they took their marriage vows – is completely ridiculous. She says they had the pre-Cana course and waited the six months before the wedding. She has petitioned the Vatican to annul the annulment.

Not that Sheila Kennedy wants to annul the divorce. The divorce is final. She just wants Joe to know he can’t say they were never married in the eyes of God.

Both non-Catholics and Catholics have a hard time understanding annulment. For one thing, there is that pesky rumor that money will buy one. Sheila Kennedy contends that money and power bought Joe’s annulment – and she wants the rich, ol’ Vatican to take it back.

But a bigger problem is the apparent laxity of the marriage tribunals. It seems – to outsiders, at least – that anyone who wants an annulment gets one.

A third difficulty is that many people do not understand what a vow is, what a sacrament is, what God is, and why these factors make annulment different from civil divorce.

ECONOMIC RESPONSIBILITY

First, what are the economic facts?

To say there are no abuses would be incorrect. Nothing except God Himself is perfect. It’s part of the nature of things that anything run by Man will have its foibles and its frauds – including marriage tribunals.

An annulment in the diocese of San Jose costs $400. The money goes for processing costs, that is, salaries for secretaries, mailings, etc. The tribunal asks for the money upfront. You pay. then you send in a biography of your life and marriage, the names and addresses of people who knew you during the marriage and a way to contact your former spouse. Then you wait. There are no more requests for money.

The average annulment takes nine months to a year to process. "Difficult cases" take longer, about two years. Figures on denials are hard to dredge up because people don’t step forward and talk about being turned down. Neither does the Church. A tribunal official will never argue with the critics – as a divorce lawyer might, for example.

THE CHURCH APPEARS LAX

Conservatives have been saying for a long time that the real reason people like Kennedy get annulments approved is not because they pay, but because the church is getting too lax. Fifty years ago, annulments were rare, so rare that people didn’t bother applying – and sometimes this meant they didn’t even bother getting divorced. Applicants had to prove that one party was incapable of making the vow (from immaturity or mental illness, for example) or that one party was dishonest and never intended to keep the vow (perhaps a bigamist or someone who covered up the intention never to have children). If you couldn’t prove the vow was invalid at its making, then you stayed married in the eyes of God – for eternity.

Times changed – that is, the way we interpreted the times changed. Divorces increased. Families got smaller. People stopped going to church. And the complaints against the annulment procedure got louder.

People want the Church to "lighten up." And pastors want it, too. Recently, 24 dissident Catholic groups called a press conference asking the U.S. bishops to petition for an end to annulments.

The truth about annulment is that one cannot understand it apart from the Catholic Sacraments of Marriage. The Sacrament involves the union of a man and a woman who have the intention of loving one another forever for the purpose of raising children. Like all sacraments, the Sacrament of Marriage has "form" and "matter." Water is the "matter" of Baptism, for example. In marriage, the vow itself is the matter; the vow is what joins the man and woman and makes them husband and wife. The vow is made to each other and to God in the presence of a priest. It is something man cannot put asunder. Only God can dispense from the vow – that is, the Church acting according to the will of God, through the Holy Spirit. The same message of Christ to the Apostles that allows priests to forgive sins also allows priests of the tribunal to "loose" the vows of marriage: "what you bind on Earth will be bound in Heaven; what you loose on Earth will be loosed in Heaven."

A man who serves five years in prison for stealing is not automatically forgiven by God. He must go to the Sacrament of Confession. Similarly, a man or woman who has his marriage severed in divorce court is not thereby "loosed." He must have the Sacrament of Marriage "loosed" by the Church. This does not, of course, nullify the years spent being married or the children’s paternity, jut as confessing to theft does not nullify the original act or the money lost. Rather, the situations are "forgiven."

A VOW IS NOT JUST A PROMISE ONE KEEPS WHEN IT’S CONVENIENT

Obviously it is impossible to argue the merits of annulment to a person who does not believe in God. Or to a person who does not believe that God continues to communicate to His creatures through His Church and His sacraments. Or to a person who believes a vow is just a promise one keeps only when it’s convenient.

Much of the criticism of the annulment process comes from modernists who say we only have one life; therefore, have fun, do it your way. Accordingly, marriage is just a piece of paper; a vow is just a bunch of words. God is dead – or a myth – or a good buddy who forgives all.

The Church teaches that God does, indeed, lay down rules (the Ten Commandments) and He expects us to live by them. He’s not just a good buddy; He is the Absolute Lawgiver, the Almighty Father, The Supreme Parent. We are His children, and the point of our existence here is to earn existence There – to obey.

The Church teaches that this life is not the most important one we have to worry about: Eternity looms and lasts longer. This life is a preparation, sometimes a Purgatory, for the next. And the vows we make to God in this life, are serious, binding and eternal. Thus the vow we make to our marriage partner is serious, binding and eternal. It takes an act of the Church to release someone from it.

There is no question the annulment process has been cheapened by the idea that anyone can get one. The "little red book" of annulment procedure called Annulment: Your Chance to Remarry Within the Catholic Church, by Joseph P. Zwack is a manual for this type of thinking. Zwack argues that 95 percent of marriages can be annulled for psychological reasons and he urged people to "go for it."

It is undeniable that it is more difficult to remain married in today’s free-for-all climate. We may try to live as Catholics, but the cultural soil that nurtures us is the soil of the world. And the Church wants to offer its sacramental respite, especially for the innocent who would be imprisoned by their own or their spouse’s sin. So annulment is there, like the Sacrament of Confession, but tougher. It requires more time, more effort and more proof.

NEWCHURCH THEOLOGY WOULD DESTROY MARRIAGE

Some NewChurch thinkers try to find reasons why annulment is just an antiquated Church law that is out of step with the times. They say that 1) Jesus was speaking from his own cultural perspective when he told people not to put asunder what God had united in marriage. 2) Since the vow is made by the man and the woman, Church bureaucracy should not be necessary to release it. 3) Since the Church recognizes a second marriage after a first marriage partner dies, why shouldn’t the Church recognize a second marriage after the first marriage dies? 4) Pastoral concerns necessitate scrapping the annulment system because people who remarry need the grace of the sacraments (Statistics show that second marriages fail at a higher rate than first marriages). 5) A realty check shows that Catholics who have to go through a lot of "mumbo-jumbo" just leave the Church.

If there was a way the Church could eliminate annulment without eliminating marriage as a sacrament, it would do so – in a flash. Priests and bishops do not like alienating people. They like being liked. And they don’t like losing disgruntled parishioners. But there is no way the Church can do this.

Christ instituted seven sacraments, and marriage was one. The Church cannot discard annulment without minimizing marriage. No matter how high the divorce rate climbs, the Church must remain steadfast in its refusal to accept the cavalier breaking of the bond.

Is Big Blue Big Brother?

By Robert Holland

One gathers from a recent discussion at the National Education Goals Panel (NEGP) that an innocuous-sounding new organization called Achieve is the blunt instrument to bring about the work-force/technologized brand of school reform favored by big business. Leading the charge for the corporate-statists is technology titan IBM and its CEO, Louis V. Gerstner Jr.

Lamenting the fact that "the American public has this ethic of local control, Colorado Gov. Roy Romer told fellow NEGP members, "this country needs an institution . . . to organize all the changes . . . I think the best crack at that institution, quite frankly, is Achieve." Indeed, if the intent is to move away from local control of education to a system run by rich and powerful elites, then Achieve is the best bet. In many key respects it has been set up like a self-perpetuating subsidiary of IBM.

A little background: Annoyed by grass-roots opposition to the Goals 2000/School-to-Work model of systemic restructuring, Gerstner called fellow big-biz chiefs and the nation’s governors to a National Education summit last year at IBM headquarters in Palisades, New York. The business leaders threatened to withhold new or expanded operations from states that balk at work-force prep as the new paradigm for public education. To make the blackmail credible, they agreed to fund a nongovernmental entity to monitor each state’s setting of standards. Achieve is that entity, having opened a Washington office early in 1997. Its twelve-member board is evenly split between CEOs and governors. A search is underway for a high-profile director, perhaps a retired CEO.

Having called the summit, Gerstner now serves as cochair of Achieve’s board; furthermore, if vacancies occur among business members, Gerstner will name the replacements.

Average folks may want no part of national education standards that aim to produce compliant, TQM-trained workers as opposed to literate, independent minded individuals.

Only the naive think that corporate moguls are leading the charge out of altruistic motives. It is no coincidence that technology companies like IBM are out in front. Wiring all K-12 students to the Internet, as President Clinton has proposed, would create a market of 50 million children for IBM and other computer companies. By demanding electronic portfolios to track all children into careers and through their working lives, school-to-work opens another avenue for big bucks to blow into big business. Much of the summit communique shamelessly hawked technology as a panacea for education.

People who don’t like the idea of IBM joining forces with state governors to seize control over education away from local institutions should speak out. One citizen can make a big difference at the state legislature. And don’t hesitate to share your thoughts with Gerstner. His address is: IBM Corporation, Old Orchard Road, Armonk, NY 10504.

& Book Review &

Mainline churches committing suicide

Mainline protestant churches are losing members; everybody knows that. What’s interesting is that liberal Catholics are trying to follow them right down the drain.

A new book called The Empty Church, the Suicide of Liberal Christianity, by Thomas C. Reeves (New York: The Free Press, Simon and Schuster, 1996, $25) lays out the whole grim picture, statistic-by-statistic. Reeves is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside and a Senior Fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. A member of the Episcopal Church, he has been studying the demise of religious influence on politics for decades.

Taking his cue from C. S. Lewis, Reeves argues that orthodoxy requires faith in an all-powerful God who was and is capable of the miraculous. He believes that Christianity without miracles is dead and makes its Founder and the apostles madmen.

America has always been a religious nation; even today, most people say they believe in a God, but 44 percent of them don’t attend a church, according to the pollster Gallup. When asked why they don’t go to church, most of the reasons do not reflect animosity toward organized religion. Going to church just doesn’t seem that important; 34 percent said they were too busy – the same reason they give for not subscribing to a newspaper.

For Americans, the problem is independence; Religious authority appears to lie in the believer, not in the Church or the Bible.

"This is true of modern American Catholics as well. The massive changes made since Vatican II, consistently celebrated by liberal Catholics, have had unintended results. Gallup reported that 77 percent said they relied on their (uninformed) consciences rather than papal teaching in making difficult moral decisions. Polls show Catholics lending strong support for legal abortion, artificial birth control (they are more likely than Protestants to be childless), "safe sex" education in schools, and the ordination of women, all positions officially opposed by their church.

"According to Gallup, Catholic Church attendance fell from 74 percent in 1958 to an all-time low of 48 percent in 1988. A study published in 1994 by University of Notre Dame sociologists Mark Chaves and James C. Cavendish found that the national average was a mere 26.7 percent."

The liberal Catholic sociologist Andrew Greeley called the low-percentage study "sloppy work," but it certainly seems to gibe with what people in the pew are seeing most Sundays.

Welcome to the age of Secular Religion. Reeves says that while liberal theologians attempt to "deconstruct" Jesus as the Son of God and Mary as His mother, liberal bishops and priests are following through with bare-bones churches devoid of spiritual artifacts and wimpy sermons about ecology and world hunger. In addition, they are not teaching the religion to parishioners or to young people hungry for answers.

"If Sunday schools are teaching about condoms and poverty in Rwanda, there is little time for things like Scripture and Church history. And if the clergy present the faith merely as a branch of anthropology or social work, there is little need for anyone to be informed."

This superficiality of Christianity finds its expression in the destructive behavior that mars our everyday lives: crime, violence, divorce, insensitivity, vulgarity, sexually transmitted diseases. People don’t think going to church is relevant to solving any of these problems.

"Liberal Protestantism in particular has become so secularized and indistinct that it cannot compete successfully with an abundance of causes and activities that many find more valuable . . . occupations, neighborhoods, athletic teams, hobbies and ethnic groups . . . political parties and organizations . . . community groups . . . professional counselors . . . schools, the media, computer networks, concerts, lectures.

"Weigh the benefits: Sunday with the family at the beach or in church listening to a sermon on AIDS; working for overtime wages or enduring pious generalities about ‘dialoguing,’ ‘inclusiveness,’ and ‘sharing and caring;’ study for exams or hearing the consolations and promises of the Bible are not ‘really or literally’ true; entering a race to raise funds for disadvantaged children or sitting through pleas for federal health insurance; shopping at the mall or hearing about the wickedness of anti-abortion demonstrators; reading the newspaper or being harangued about racism and sexism."

Reeves concludes that churches need to get back to basics. Give ’em God. But he doesn’t ask the crucial question: Why, with all the evidence to the contrary, do liberal church officials continue this dance with extinction? They are like rabbits on a country road, frightened of the approaching headlights, yet running headlong into the glare.

& Book Review &

A how-to book on Catholic parenting

A Little Child Shall Lead them, Hopeful Parenting in a Confused World by Johann Christoph Arnold (Farmington, Pa., Plough Publishing House, 1997), was praised by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger for writing down "what the Pope is tirelessly teaching. I am happy that this book is written simply so we can all understand it. It is indeed very beautiful."

Arnold and his wife, Verena, have eight children and 14 grandchildren of their own. He is a senior elder of the Bruderhof, a consortium of eight Christian communes in the United States and England with about 25,000 members.

Arnold’s premise is that many of the problems in the world (crime, violence, divorce, child abuse) come from failing step No. 1: parenting children because they are personal gifts from God. Indeed, children are our key to heaven; Christ said, "Suffer the little children to come unto me, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven."

Whereas most parental "how-to" books are based on techniques and prescriptions, this "how-to" is based on getting the nitty-gritty of everyday problems to fall into line with a Christian life. Arnold discusses very basic issues like bed-wetting and not spoiling the gifted child. Yet he offers some good straight talk on philosophical issues like sex-education in the schools:

"Sex education began as an off-shoot of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Like the revolution itself, sex education as it is commonly taught in our schools is based on the premise (even if not stated) that sex is primarily a form of recreation. Its goal, therefore, is to instruct teens on how to engage in sexual activity while avoiding pitfalls such as unwanted pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases. It is unlikely that this goal will be openly admitted, even by the strongest advocates of sex education. Yet an honest look at the materials used in most schools can only lead to the conclusion that this is, indeed, the actual intent."

Arnold believes children suffer overall from the modern world’s preoccupation with materialism, from parents spending too much time at careers to inane television commercials.

"The spirit of mammon is also at the root of abortion. The deliberate, legalized killing of the unborn is. I believe, worse than the Massacre of the Innocents in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago. No matter how painful or difficult the circumstances of conception or birth, and no matter how debilitated or deformed a baby, we must witness to the fact that every human being is created by God in his image, and that each one has a purpose: To destroy a child, whether born or unborn, is to deface the image of God."

The basic threat to our children is that so many no longer understand this.

C Theatre Review D

Pearl of York: A play with the young in mind

At a time when our young people are exposed almost daily to such "role models" as Madonna, Ellen DeGeneres, Dennis Rodman, and the stars of MTV, there is a pressing need to bring to their attention a few of the authentic heroes of the Catholic Church.

One such "hero" would be little known Margaret Clitherow, a 16th century Englishwoman who died for her faith during the reign of Henry VIII. The story of this courageous woman was presented this spring in the Pearl of York, a play by local writer Cathal Gallagher and the Quo Vadis Theater Company.

It was presented at the Sunnyvale Community Playhouse for two weekends in late May. The amateur cast was convincing, the costumes very authentic, and the story of one simple, uncomplicated woman who stood tall against the oppressive English authorities – church and state – inspiring.

Jodie Smith in the title role of Margaret Clitherow gave an especially remarkable performance.

The View from the Pew would love to see the diocese of San Jose and the local Catholic high schools take steps to present the Pearl of York to our teenagers who are in desperate need of more positive role models in these fast-moving times.

K Dim views K

U.S. Catholic school enrollment drops

Despite frequent assurances by the Church that it is committed to providing education in urban primarily non-Catholic areas, officials concede the mission is increasingly expensive and difficult. The immigrant communities who formed parishes and parish schools have moved to the suburbs, and new populations are often poorer and simply can’t help pay the bill.

"Our urban schools are the most needed because in many urban areas the (public) schools are not doing the job," said Robert Kealey, executive director for elementary schools at the National Catholic Education Association. "But the people attending these schools are the poorest in society, and the population of these urban parishes has dwindled."

Approximately 45 percent of Catholic schools nationwide is in cities, but in the past five years their numbers have dropped from 4,010 to 3,725.

L Dimmer views L

‘Making all things new’ makes all things bland

It is very much like so many other churches: the white cloth draped over the bare altar inscribed in large, cheerful letters, "Making all things new; a tasteful stained glass cross without the corpus, banners of various colors covering side walls and several smaller drapes in the sanctuary with pictures of festive multi-colored balloons.

There are no statues or holy pictures to be seen anywhere in the church, and, of course, no altar rail or confessionals. Hymnals in the pews contain familiar songs and prayers.

What Catholic Church is this? Oh, you thought it was yours? No, it is the United Methodist Church in Los Altos. Isn’t it nice that we’re all together on "how to be Church?"

N Dimmest views N

Bishops support Graham

The Valley Catholic reports that Archbishop William Levada of San Francisco sent this message to parishioners on the Billy Graham Crusade.

"I have no doubt that Catholics who attend the Crusade in October will derive blessings from their participation."

The Diocese of San Jose went further by supplying the Crusade schedule for those interested.

Let’s set the record straight: Protestant crusades are for the purpose of making converts to Protestantism. Catholics should stay home and pray for their bishops’ conversion to Catholicism.

Bishop’s mea culpa

Bishop Willie Walsh of Ireland has apologized for the hurt caused Protestants who married Catholics and were forced to raise their children in the Catholic faith.

The bishop of Killaloe called the religious (Ne temere) requirement "contrary to the spirit of Christian generosity and love."

The apology was welcomed by the Church of Ireland, which cites the ruling as a main cause of the decline of Protestantism in the republic.

Speech given by Archbishop John Quinn at Oxford - June, 1996

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