It would be a mistake for Rome to assume that the Church’s relationship with families caught up in divorce can be resolved simply by making the annulment process easier. When my Catholic American aunt married my divorced uncle, they gave a lot of thought to the possibility of going for an annulment but decided not to do so. It made no sense, as they saw it, to seek the annulment of a marriage which had taken place more than 20 years earlier, in a register office, between my agnostic uncle and his Jewish fiancée. What possible connection could that ceremony have had with the Catholic sacrament? And the very thought of an annulment would have been gravely resented by my uncle’s three children.
I do not think there is any problem getting people to value the indissolubility of marriage, but when the living of that ideal becomes impossible, the last thing people want is to have to suffer a legalistic procedure which is widely seen as irrelevant to the reality of their lives.
Carol Kellas, Croydon, Surrey
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