Catholic Groups Ask Bishops To Allow Divorce

Twenty-four Catholic dissident groups plan to release an open letter to the nation’s Catholic bishops today calling for the church to abandon the annulment process and allow divorced Catholics to remarry in the church.

The groups are asking that the Roman Catholic church adopt the practice of the Eastern Orthodox churches, which do not use annulments but do grant divorces. The groups will be joined in Boston by Sheila Rauch Kennedy, an Episcopalian who has written a book criticizing the annulment process based on the church’s decision to annul her marriage to Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy, D-Mass.

Until now, Catholic reformists have targeted issues such as priestly celibacy, birth control, abortion and the ban on women clergy. Now they are adding to their agenda annulments, a practice that even some priests acknowledge is driving loyal Catholics away from the church.

A divorced Catholic who has not received an annulment is not permitted to remarry in the church, go to confession or receive Holy Communion. To obtain an annulment, one spouse has to prove to a church tribunal that the marriage was never sacramentally valid under church law. The other spouse does not necessarily have to agree.

“There is still a lot of pain out there caused by the whole issue of the way the church handles remarriage,” Sheila Kennedy said Friday.

Although nine out of 10 divorcing Catholics do not choose to go through the process, the number of annulments granted has risen steadily in the past few decades. In the United States, 54,463 were granted in 1994.

In their open letter, the 24 groups say the process “forces many to violate their consciences” in order to convince the tribunals to grant their annulments. “We seek a return to a more authentic teaching … and a restoration of the tradition of the first 1100 years” of church history.

The groups claim that until the year 1200, the church allowed divorce and remarriage. “The Church balanced the ideal - that marriage should be permanent - with the compassion Jesus showed to those who could not fulfill the ideal,” the open letter says.