In Record Numbers, Catholics Who Love the Church but No Longer Love Their Spouses Are Seeking to . . . : Annul and Void

Joseph P. Kennedy II put in his request after 11 years and a set of twins. By the time Princess Caroline got hers, she had a new husband and three children. Sharon Stone’s beau, Bill MacDonald, whisked her away for “a honeymoon” while awaiting his.

Annulments. They’re not just for virgins anymore.

In truth, says the Roman Catholic Church, they never were. Nor are they a privilege of wealth and fame, dependent upon huge gifts to the church or in any way threatening to the legitimacy of children.

But what they most definitely are is popular--more popular today than at any time in the 2,000-year-history of the church. And nowhere are they more popular than in the United States, where at least 72% of all the world’s annulments are granted.

Or as one religion writer recently concluded, “The United States is to annulments what Nevada is to divorce.”

The who’s who of American annulees includes Frank Sinatra, Lee Iacocca, Pat Sajak and Lee Radziwill. Sen. Ted Kennedy is reportedly seeking one from his first wife, Joan, although he is already remarried to Catholic lawyer Victoria Reggie. The first wife of Mayor Richard Riordan sought and was granted an annulment after 23 years of marriage and five children.

But most of the church’s 50,000 or so annual petitions for annulment come from lesser-known men and women who simply want to get on with their lives. “I wanted to finish that chapter of my life. I wanted closure,” explains a Pasadena paralegal whose 22-year marriage was recently annulled.

The Los Angeles diocese ranks fourth in the nation in the number of annulments requested, but could handle more if not for the severe priest shortage here, say Catholic leaders. Still, the workload is so great that the marriage tribunal of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles recently computerized a portion of the process. And at area religious stores, the shelves can’t be stocked fast enough to keep up with demand for annulment guidebooks.

But despite their frequency, annulments continue to stir strong emotions among both parishioners and the clergy.

Early this month, a church newspaper rushed to defend the Riordans’ annulment in the face of charges the church applied “a double standard” to the mayor. The archdiocesan weekly, the Tidings, was responding to reader complaints that Riordan, married twice and separated from his second wife, received special treatment because of his wealth, power and friendship with Cardinal Roger M. Mahony.

Before his election as mayor, Riordan, a lifelong Catholic, helped raise tens of millions of dollars for the archdiocese’s education foundation and was the principal donor of a $400,000 jet helicopter for Mahony’s use. “There is no double standard in the way ‘celebrated’ and ‘ordinary’ Catholics are treated under canon (church) law,” wrote Tidings columnist Father Gregory Coiro. “These perceptions are false, and, many times, fodder for anti-Catholicism.”

Of the many myths surrounding the annulment process, says Msgr. Craig A. Cox, the “most pernicious” is the notion that one must be rich, famous, or well-connected to get one.

The annulment, properly known as “a decree of nullity,” is a process by which the church finds a marriage--already ended in divorce--to also be invalid according to church standards. Many divorced Catholics seek the decrees so they may remarry in the church and continue to celebrate Communion and other sacraments.

Historically, some skeptics have viewed annulment as an ecclesiastical wink at broken marriages. “The process is medieval and un-Christian,” talk-show host Phil Donahue recently told USA Today. “A group of celibate men decide whether an agreement you made 20 years ago was valid in the eyes of the church. . . . In my case, that union brought five children into the world. How do I explain it to them?”

Because Donahue divorced and remarried Marlo Thomas, also a Catholic, without having his first marriage annulled, he may no longer receive church sacraments. “Now, at weddings and funerals, people crawl over me to get to the (Communion) rail,” he says. “I guess it is public punishment for my sin.”

But for many Catholics who go through it, the annulment process feels therapeutic and cathartic. Increasingly, church lawyers say, the annulment is viewed as a compassionate theological response to the fact that some unions are simply not meant to be.

As overseer of the region’s marriage tribunal, Cox sees hundreds of such ill-begotten unions every year. Some are easy to spot--the marriages for immigration, the shotgun weddings, the marriages made for money, not love. But many are not.

Some of the 700 or so cases that come before the tribunal’s canon lawyers are not so obvious. And it can take years of investigation and psychological evaluation to determine whether a marriage--even one blessed by the church--was truly made in heaven.

“What we must determine,” says Cox, “is what the real goal of the union was. In Genesis, we are admonished not to divide what God has joined. But how do we know that God has joined a particular union?”

To find out, the church asks, in essence, “Just what were you thinking?”

A full 98% of the annulments given American Catholics are granted on psychological grounds--reasons drawn from testimony of witnesses and the couple themselves. “We want to know the important facts about the courtship and the wedding day itself,” says Cox. “What transpires after that is not of interest to the church, but one’s intentions at the time this contract was made are critical.”

This emphasis on thoughts and behaviors and the church’s acceptance a decade ago of such grounds is considered a major reason for the dramatic rise in U.S. annulments.

But Vatican officials, who have unsuccessfully attempted to crack down on the U.S. church for granting so many annulments, wonder whether the rise truly means Americans have more mental problems than the rest of the world.

“Well, I can’t comment on that,” says canon legal scholar Father Pat Cogan at Catholic University in Washington. “But I can say that the American Catholic Church is exceedingly vigilant in providing for trained persons to work on (annulment petitions).”

Industrialized nations also have more divorces--the rate is about 50% for the United States--and many more therapists to help those breaking up understand what happened.

“From modern psychology,” says Cox, “we’ve come to understand that the way humans work is perhaps more complex than earlier generations fully appreciated.” For earlier generations, “invalidating impediments” to marriage included such arcane reasons as inability to consummate a marriage, murder of a previous spouse or consanguinity (marrying a blood relation).

Today, the list has been expanded to include drug or alcohol addiction and growing up in a dysfunctional family.

“We may take into account the sort of scarring that occurs from growing up in an abusive home, as a victim of incest,” says Cox. “Such traumas can affect a person’s ability to understand marriage. People can be so wounded they can only take and never give. If the neediness is so great, how can you commit yourself to a marriage?”

“When I got married,” recalls a La Canada-Flintridge businesswoman, “I was 20 years and 10 days old. We’d only dated a few times. . . . I got pregnant right away because we’re good Catholics, of course, and it was 1954, so, despite all the problems, we stayed married.”

She stayed married for 31 years and even after the divorce, she didn’t consider an annulment. “I had been so married. I had six children. How could I?”

While numbers of children and length of marriage are no factor in the annulment process, the myth that children will be rendered “illegitimate” continues to haunt some Catholics. “Children born of a legal union are legitimate forever,” says Cox. “The decree of nullity affects only the sacrament of marriage, how the marriage is seen through the eyes of the church.”

When the businesswoman decided to ask for an annulment, her parish priest at first refused to help her. “We were well-known and active in the church and I believe he felt it would set a bad example.”

She appealed directly to the marriage tribunal and within a year her petition was approved, freeing her to remarry later this year in the church. Only then, she says, was she billed for the service. “I paid $350, plus a $50 filing fee,” she says. Fees range from $50 to $450 in the Los Angeles, but are waived for those unable to pay.

Not all church leaders are comfortable with the American church’s new way of looking at marriage, says Cox, who organized a group of specially trained volunteers to help parishioners throughout the archdiocese understand the annulment process.

“In a church that says no to abortion, to euthanasia, to premarital sex, to contraception and homosexuality,” says one L.A. Catholic, “it’s very refreshing when it says yes: ‘Yes, you can start again. Yes, like the Prodigal Son, you are forgiven.’ ”

“I was being smothered in my marriage, I was dying, when I finally got up my nerve to walk out,” says a 25-year-old divorcee from Highland Park. “But I wanted to leave my husband because he drank and was abusive but I never, ever wanted to leave the church. Then a sister at our school, she told me maybe I didn’t have to. “

As part of the diocese’s Spanish-language outreach program, the woman recently initiated a petition for annulment. “Most people in my neighborhood don’t think you can do this unless you are real important and rich or know somebody who is. But it’s not that way. Thank God.”

Making the Spiritual Break Roman Catholicism isn’t the only religion with processes for recognizing the dissolution of marriages. Here are some others:

Judaism: Conservative and Orthodox Jews are required to obtain a “get” before remarrying in a formal Jewish ceremony. The 12-line document describes the marriage deterioration and must be scrutinized by a rabbinical tribunal.

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints: Mormon couples wed in formal temple ceremonies are “sealed through eternity,” and divorce can cause at least temporary loss of church membership. Remarriage in the temple requires re-establishment of church standing, a process revealed only to church members.

Episcopal Church: Any church member whose marriage has been dissolved by a civil court may apply to the bishop for a judgment regarding his or her marital status in the eyes of the church. “The church will grant permission for remarriage without annulment of the previous marriage, although there is an annulment process for marriages in which there was fraud, coercion or mistakes in identity,” says the Rev. John Hardie of All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills.

United Methodist Church: The church offers a service of healing for persons going through divorce. The granting of a divorce does not affect a parishioner’s access to church sacraments. Remarriage is permitted after counseling within the church.

Hinduism: Marriages are traditionally arranged by families and divorce is not provided for in the traditional literature of the faith. “Although Hindus can obtain a civil divorce, the faith is so family-oriented that it would be highly unusual for a second marriage to take place,” says Christopher Chapple, chairman of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University.