VATICAN CITY (CNS): Granting marriage annulments too easily and without real cause plays into a modern form of pessimism that basically says human beings are not able to make lifelong commitments to loving another person, Pope Benedict XVI said.
“We run the risk of falling into an anthropological pessimism which, in the light of today’s cultural situation, considers it almost impossible to marry,” the Pope said in a speech on January 29 to members of the Tribunal of the Roman Rota.
The tribunal mainly deals with appeals filed in marriage annulment cases.
Pope Benedict said there was still a need to deal with a problem Pope John Paul II pointed out in a 1987 speech to the Roman Rota, that of saving the Church community from “the scandal of seeing the value of Christian marriage destroyed in practise by the exaggerated and almost automatic multiplication of declarations of nullity”.
Pope Benedict said he agreed with Pope John Paul that too often members of Church tribunals saw a failed marriage and granted the annulment on the basis of an ill-defined case of “immaturity or psychic weakness”.
According to canon law, the validity of a marriage requires that both the man and woman freely and publicly consent to the union and that they have the psychological capacity to assume the obligations of marriage.
Pope Benedict said tribunal judges must remember there is a difference between the full maturity and understanding that people should strive to develop over time and “canonical maturity, which is the minimum point of departure for the validity of a marriage”.
In addition, he said, granting an annulment on the basis of the “psychic incapacity” of the husband or wife required that the tribunal established and documented the fact that the person had a serious psychological or psychiatric problem at the time the wedding was celebrated.
In defending the permanent and sacramental nature of marriage, tribunals were not making life difficult for couples that wanted to split up, the Pope said.
Defending the marriage bond gave witness to the fact that the ability to love and to pledge oneself to another forever was part of human nature, he said.
