Every year, Pope Benedict XVI gives a speech to the judges of the Roman Rota, a Vatican court that mainly handles marriage cases.
He usually includes a warning about handing out annulments too easily, and Americans invariably assume that he's talking about them.
On this matter they may have a point: Vatican statistics say that more than 60% of annulments come from the United States.
Official Catholic teaching holds that marriage is for life, and hence divorce is not tolerated.
Yet church law provides for an "annulment," meaning a formal declaration that a marriage never existed, usually on the grounds that at least one of the parties lacked the capacity to give true consent.
To secure an annulment, Catholics have to turn to church courts, which can be time-consuming and expensive.
Annulment has drawn a variety of criticisms over the years.
Secularists tend to sniff at the whole idea, deriding it as "Catholic divorce," a way for the church to have its cake and eat it too—claiming to uphold marriage, but providing a way out for people willing to jump through some ecclesiastical hoops.
Theologians and canon lawyers bristle at those arguments, claiming that the church believes in the sanctity of marriage so strongly that it insists that all conditions have to be in place for a real marriage to exist.
Critics have long asserted that annulments favor the rich and powerful.
In the Middle Ages, it was notoriously easier for kings and princes to secure annulments than for common folk.
(What made the case of England's Henry VIII remarkable is precisely that a pope actually said "no.")
That charge surfaced prominently in the U.S. in 1997, when Sheila Rauch Kennedy wrote that her ex-husband, then-Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II, had their marriage of 12 years annulled without even informing her.
Ms. Rauch charged that the Kennedy clan's influence explained the outcome, which she opposed: An annulment meant her marriage had been a sham, she argued, but that was a lie.
As it turns out, she had the last laugh.
Her appeal to the Vatican was upheld in 2005, meaning that in the eyes of the Catholic Church, she and Mr. Kennedy remain married.
The charge of bias for the rich is now hard to sustain, at least in the U.S. According to the Canon Law Society of America, in 2009 annulment procedures cost $31 million, but only $4.9 million of that came in fees collected from the parties.
The balance, some $26.1 million, was kicked in by the dioceses themselves, precisely to ensure that people struggling to make ends meet can still use the system.
These days, the most common criticism comes from conservative circles within the church, and it's usually directed at the U.S.: America, they charge, is an annulment factory that undercuts church teaching on marriage.
That's probably the background to Benedict's recent speech, in which he asserted that no one has a "right" to marriage.
He called for pastors to do a better job preparing people to marry, so there would be less demand for annulments.
In light of these papal warnings, church courts have become a bit more rigorous, and parishes are more careful about remarrying people who have had annulments—not wanting them to make a habit of it.
Yet America's annulment practice has its defenders.
More annulments are granted here, they argue, because church courts make sure the process is open to everyone, that it functions smoothly, and that people know their rights.
Don't blame us, they say, because we're good at what we do. As one American canon lawyer testily wrote a decade ago: "Americans make up six percent of the world's population, but they account for 100 percent of the men on the moon. So what? America functions. Much of the rest of the world does not."
In truth, things are already trending the way Benedict seems to want, though not necessarily for reasons likely to give him cheer.
Since 2006, according to the Canon Law Society of America, both the number of cases filed and the number of annulments granted have been gradually declining.
That may be partly because courts have become tougher.
But it's probably more related to the fact that fewer Catholics are getting married in the church, and fewer of those who are bother to seek an annulment if their marriage breaks down.
For Benedict XVI, in other words, this may be a classic case of "Be careful what you wish for."
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