
The First Vocation Crisis | Jeff Ziegler | Special Report for CWR
Coinciding with the decline of marriage in the United States is the decline of sacramental marriage in the Church. Here’s a look at the US bishops’ efforts to address the collapse.
Addressing the societal collapse of marriage, the US bishops have issued a pastoral letter praised by defenders of the Church’s teaching on family life.
In an August interview, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York discussed the four greatest challenges he believes the Church in the United States is facing today. First on his list was the state of marriage.
“That’s where we have the real vocation crisis,” he said. “We have a vocation crisis to lifelong, life-giving, loving, faithful marriage. If we take care of that one, we’ll have all the priests and nuns we need for the Church.”
The statistics, by any measure, bear out Archbishop Dolan’s observation. While it’s widely acknowledged that this vision of “lifelong, life-giving, loving, faithful” marriage—once shared by Catholics and non-Catholics alike—has collapsed in recent decades, statistics published by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia manifest the depth of the collapse:
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Oh dear. A truly terrific article, featuring several terrific people, and I'm reading and saying to myself "Right on! Yes! Right again..." and then, bam, I run smack into the "it-must-be-true-cuz-everybody-sez-it" ubiquitous phrase "the annulment scandal". Annulment scandal?
What annulment scandal?
The article itself claims that one-in-four (American) Catholics are divorced, and that only 15% of them have (only sought?) annulments. So, at most, about 3% of American Catholics have annulments. Where's the scandal in that? How many annulments should there be to keep us under the "scandal-level"?
Z's article rightly points out the LEGION (npi) of assaults on marriage being endured by real people marrying today, and we're supposed to believe that such forces have NO impact on those people marrying? That they somehow approach marriage blithely immune to such evil and pandemic dysfunction and false teaching and worldly allurement? Gee, whoddathunkit?
If the canons on nullity cannot account for even 10% of actual broken marriages today, then, by golly, matrimonial canon law must have no relevance to real marriage. And we should chuck the whole thing. Which I refuse to believe.
If "the annulment scandal" really has "led to a great deal of cynicism regarding Catholic weddings", then maybe, just maybe, some of the blame rest with those, including those who should know better, who keep repeating the "annulment-scandal" mantra. The reality is, thins are more complicated than they appear.
Anyway, folks who prefer to THINK about these things might want to check my article: http://www.canonlaw.info/a_annulments.htm.
Posted by: Ed Peters | Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 12:28 PM
When Christendom College's Dr. Timothy O'Donnell refers in the linked article to an "annulment scandal," he appears to have papal backing. In a 1987 address to the Roman Rota, Pope John Paul II said that "the arduous task of the judge" in matrimonial cases "is a ministry of charity towards the ecclesial community which is preserved from the scandal of seeing the value of Christian marriage being practically destroyed by the exaggerated and almost automatic multiplication of declarations of nullity of marriage in cases of the failure of marriage on the pretext of some immaturity or psychic weakness on the part of the contracting parties."
Posted by: J. | Sunday, January 31, 2010 at 08:15 AM