Pope Benedict XVI last Saturday gave Vatican judges a strong warning that they should not be too easy-going towards couples who ask for their marriage to be declared void. Speaking at the opening of the judicial year of the tribunal of the Rota Romana, the Vatican's appeals court, the Pope remarked that the "truth of marriage" is fading and that this is affecting also "the way many faithful think".
"The indissoluble conjugal bond", he said, is coming to be regarded as an "ideal" that "cannot be made obligatory for normal Christians".
He reminded judges (known as auditors) not to fall prey to a "distorted interpretation of the canonical norms in force". "In fact," he added, "the conviction has spread even in some ecclesiastical realms, according to which the pastoral good of individuals in irregular marital situations would call for a kind of canonical regularisation of their situation, regardless of the validity or invalidity of their marriage."
The Rota deals mostly with marriage annulment cases. In 2006, the tribunal had 1,679 cases in hand and delivered 126 definitive sentences, in 69 cases granting an annulment. Reasons for annulment ranged from the husband being a "mummy's boy" to a late discovery of gay tendencies, and from infidelity to drug addiction. The number of cases seen by the Rota tribunal, or Sacra Rota Romana, has been rising steadily in recent years. In 1982 the figure was 287; in 1992, 824; and in 2002, 1,280. In 2005 the tribunal examined 1,637 cases.
Bishop Antoni Stankiewicz, dean of the Rota, disclosed the latest numbers on Saturday: the Rota is studying 1,181 cases at the start of the current judicial year. The bishop said that, among these cases, 687 are from Europe; 413 from the Americas; 64 from Asia; 12 from Africa; and five from Australia and New Zealand. The countries that presented most cases were Italy (128), the United States (38), Poland (19) and Lebanon (12).
Addressing Rota officials in January last year, the Pope insisted that decisions by church tribunals should be reached in a reasonable amount of time, but also restated clearly the Church's teaching on marriage as an objective, public and indissoluble reality.
Bishop Stankiewicz said this week that the objective of the Rota was to defend the truth about the family. "Up for debate at present is the unique natural physiognomy of marriage," he said, "in which man and woman can realise a genuine communion of persons, open to the transmission of life, thus cooperating with God in the procreation of new human beings."
Attempts had been made, he said, "in the sociopolitical and juridical life to confuse marriage with other types of unions based on a weak or disordered love". The first task of the Rota and other tribunals at diocesan levels was to be at the service of love, he insisted, recognising "the full value of marriage and protect[ing] those it has united in one single family". The bishop said the judges' duty "is respect of the person who has given his word, has expressed his consent and in this way has made a total giving of himself".
Quoting a commentary from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on Pope John Paul II's 1981 apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio, Bishop Stankiewicz concluded: marriage is not "an extrinsic imposition, but an interior exigency of the conjugal pact of love".