One of the Vatican’s top canon lawyers at the Synod of Bishops on the Family says the current process for the annulment of marriages in the Catholic Church could be streamlined and expanded to the benefit of very many people whose marriages have broken down. This could be one of the positive fruits of the Read more
The prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has strongly affirmed the Catholic Church’s teaching that Communion for remarried divorcees is forbidden. But Archbishop Gerhard L. Muller acknowledged that many Catholics’ first marriages might be invalid, and thus eligible for annulment, if spouses had been influenced by prevailing contemporary conceptions of marriage Read more
Alice Bassett-Smith was married, and now she is not. She and her United States-born husband married in 2000, lived together in both New Zealand and the US, divorced in 2008 and have both moved on. So, she was stunned when telephoned “out of the blue” by a Catholic priest a month ago and told her Read more
The Vatican may soon require a more restrictive approach to annulments. A Rome conference held in late April focused on canon 1095 of the Code of Canon Law, which allows a marriage to be declared invalid if one of the parties lacked the ability to consent because of “causes of a psychic nature.” More annulments Read more