Catholic church reform | Pope speeds up, simplifies process for marriage annulments

Pope Francis waves to the faithful as he arrives to recite the Angelus noon prayer from his studio window overlooking St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican on Sunday

Pope Francis radically reformed the Catholic Church’s process for annulling marriages yesterday, allowing for fast-track decisions and removing automatic appeals in a bid to speed up and simplify the procedure.
Francis issued a new law overhauling three centuries of church practice, placing the onus squarely on bishops around the world to now determine when a fundamental flaw has made a marriage invalid.
Catholics must get a church annulment if they want to remarry in the church. Without it, divorced Catholics who remarry civilly are considered to be adulterers living in sin and are forbidden from receiving Communion — a dilemma at the heart of a debate currently roiling the church that will come to the fore next month at a big meeting of bishops.
The church’s annulment process has long been criticized for being complicated, costly and out of reach for many Catholics, especially in poor countries where dioceses don’t have marriage tribunals.
“With this fundamental law, Francis has now launched the true start of his reform,” said Monsignor Pio Vito Pinto, the head of the Roman Rota, the church’s marriage court. “He is putting the poor at the center — that is the divorced, remarried who have been held at arms’ length — and asking for bishops to have a true change of heart.”
Reasons for granting annulments vary, including that the couple never intended their marriage to last or that one of the spouses didn’t want children.
Francis’ biggest reform involves a new fast-track procedure, handled by the local bishop, that can be used when both spouses request an annulment or don’t oppose it. It can also be used when other proof makes a more drawn-out investigation unnecessary.
It calls for the process to be completed within 45 days.
The longer, regular process should take no more than a year, officials said.
Another reform is the removal of the appeal that automatically took place after the first decision was made, even if neither spouse wanted it. An appeal is still possible, but if one of the sides requests it — a simplification that was used in the United States for many years.
The reform also allows the local bishop, in places where the normally required three-judge tribunal isn’t available, to be the judge himself or to delegate the handling of the cases to a priest-judge with two assistants.
That measure is aimed at providing Catholic couples with recourse to annulments in poorer parts of the world, or places where the church doesn’t have the resources or manpower to have fully functioning tribunals.
In the document, Francis insisted that marriage remains an indissoluble union and that the new regulations aren’t meant to help to end them. Rather, he said, the reform is aimed at speeding up and simplifying the process so that the faithful can find justice.
The overall aim of the reform, he said, “is the salvation of souls.”
“It is a democratizing move focused on easing the course of reintegration into the church for women, in particular,” said Candida Moss, professor of Biblical studies at the University of Notre Dame. “His actions are propelled by compassion and pragmatism: He recognizes the dangers of spousal abuse and the reality that many modern marriages are undertaken without full consideration.” Nicole Winfield, Vatican City, AP