No one wants to talk about the annulment crisis in the Church because it hits a little too close to home. Even the most faithful of Catholics have either had their marriages annulled or know someone close to them that has at some point. Yes, the annulment crisis has effectively evolved into a Catholic divorce crisis.[1]
Just like the sin of divorce, Catholic annulments break up families and harm children. It opens the door for second marriages and split loyalties. The money and children are forced to be split up in civil court because the bishops tell couples to get divorced in civil court before applying for an annulment. It causes scandal because the non-Catholic world understands that when annulments are granted as easily as no-fault divorces in civil court, there is no real difference in what is going on. This plague must end.
As a quick refresher, an annulment is simply a legal declaration by the appropriate Church tribunal that a putative marriage was void or null from the very beginning because of some defect that existed at the time the marriage was contracted. The marriage, in other words, never really existed. A divorce acknowledges the marriage existed, but because of some problem arising after the marriage was contracted, the marriage should be dissolved.
Of course, mainstream professional Catholic apologists will deny until the cows come home that receiving an annulment from the Church is not the same as divorce. Technically, that is true. But in the real world, the annulment process has become nothing more than a no-fault divorce system because of the ease in which annulments are granted and widely accepted as normal among faithful Catholics and clergy.
It this article, I am going to explain how that came about. You will see that the current annulment crisis is primarily due to a corruption in the doctrine of marriage itself brought about by modernist theologians at about the time of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II). Sadly, this corruption of doctrine is ubiquitous and pervasive, which explains why it is so easy to get a marriage declared null.
Defect of Consent in Annulment Cases
The United States, according to the Catholic World Report, with 5.9% of the world’s Catholics, accounted for 60% of the Church’s annulments in 2007 with approximately 35,000 total annulments granted. Of the 27,654 annulments granted in the US by the ordinary process, 99.6% were granted for reasons of defect of consent.[2] In other words, almost 80% of annulments in the United States are granted because the Church’s tribunal determined one or both parties were unable to give valid consent at the time the marriage was contracted. And THAT is where the problem lies.
Another important observation is that the number of annulments granted annually in the United States sky-rocketed from 338 in 1968 to a peak of 63,933 in 1991.[3] While the annulment numbers have been decreasing since then, this is almost certainly due to the fact fewer people are getting married.[4]
Therefore, if we are going to get to the bottom of why annulments increased significantly since Vatican II, we have to deal with the issue of “defect of consent.” The question we must ask is consent to WHAT?
To answer this question, we will need to look at the Code of Canon Law—both the 1917 and 1983 codes. And before we can look at canon law, we need to examine the Church’s doctrine on marriage.
Pope Pius XI and the Hierarchy of Ends
The doctrinal focus of this essay is going to be on the purpose, or ends, of marriage because this directly impacts what couples are consenting to at the time they enter the marriage contract. After all, since there is no marriage without consent, the purpose of marriage goes to the heart of the consent.
The Church’s doctrinal teachings on marriage, of course, date back to the time of Christ, but for convenience, our starting point will begin with Pope Pius XI’s 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii, On Christian Marriage. This encyclical quite clearly summarizes the Church’s teachings on the ends of marriage, entirely harmonious with centuries of prior Tradition.
Citing to the 1917 Code of Canon Law, Pius XI teaches that “the primary end of marriage is the procreation and the education of children.”[5]
While the primary purpose of marriage is the procreation and education of children, Pope Pius XI acknowledges there are other ends:
“For in matrimony as well as in the use of the matrimonial rights there are also secondary ends, such as mutual aid, the cultivating of mutual love, and the quieting of concupiscence which husband and wife are not forbidden to consider so long as they are subordinated to the primary end and so long as the intrinsic nature of the act is preserved (emphasis added).”[6]
Notice, the Pope does not simply mention other ends of marriage but goes out of his way to make it clear that there is a hierarchy of ends, and that all other ends of marriage are subordinated to the primary end, which is the procreation and education of children.
Thus, mutual aid or mutual love, and the quieting of concupiscence are subordinated to the procreation and education of children. These secondary ends are commonly grouped together and referred to as the “good of the spouses.”
If procreation and education of children is the primary end, that means the secondary ends must not only be subordinate but work to serve the primary end—and not vice versa. The ends are not on an equal playing field. This is just common sense if one thinks about it.
The mutual aid and love of spouses serve the procreative purpose of marriage by providing children with a stable home of two parents of the opposite sex who nurture and raise the children. A permanent matrimonial bond requires the spouses to live and work together, exercising their proper roles, primarily for the benefit of any children they generate. A family unit where the parents help and care for each other is conducive to raising faithful and healthy children.
Likewise, because marriage provides mutual rights over the body (we will dive into this in more detail), the end of quieting, or as a remedy, for concupiscence, helps with reducing the temptation to stray and seek out other partners. This end of marriage serves the primary one because it keeps the family unit intact and reduces the possibility of split loyalties or side-families, which benefits the raising of children.
Keep in mind, even if the married couple cannot have children due to age or other physical reasons, the secondary ends of marriage still exist and are subordinate to the primary end. One can imagine many reasons why this would be the case. For example, a married couple beyond child-bearing age still needs to raise all their children until they become adults. They can also support each other in old age physically and spiritually, and provide a healthy extended familial environment for adult children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews, etc. Of course, as a sacrament, matrimony also continues to provide grace until death.
The 1944 Rota Decree
The desire to update or adapt the Church’s doctrinal teachings to meet the demands of the secular world did not begin at Vatican II. There were plenty of novel ideas being spread among intellectuals that were bubbling under the surface to cause Pope Pius XI’s successor, Pope Pius XII, significant concern.
One such concern was the notion that marriage was primarily ordered to the “love of spouses,” rather than the procreation and education of children. This attempted inversion of Catholic teaching resulted in a sharp 1944 rebuke from the Church’s highest appellate court, the Sacra Romana Rota. This decision was entered into the Acta Apostolica Sedis (AAS) and is authoritative.[7]
This decision is fascinating when it restates the error it intends to correct. The error reads as if it came directly from a modern treatise or book on Theology of the Body. The Rota states the erroneous contention of the new theologians this way:
“the primary end of marriage is designated differently from the others, as for example: the completion and personal perfection of the spouses through every kind of communion of life and action; the mutual love and union of the spouses to be fostered and perfected through the psychic and somatic gift of one’s own person; and many other such things.”[8]
Take note that this erroneous formulation considered the primary end of marriage as the “completion, and personal perfection” of the spouses, and the union of the spouses through the “psychic and somatic gift of one’s own person.”
This is the type of Personalist philosophy that future Pope John Paul II would popularize with his “Theology of the Body,” and which has become the standard mainstream teaching in marriage preparation classes throughout the United States. Pay close attention to the reference to the “psychological” gift and “perfection” of the spouses in marriage. This is key to the modern annulment crisis.
The Rota soundly rejected these teachings, ruling that “[t]his new way of thinking and speaking was born to foster errors and uncertainties.” The Rota then proposed the question to itself:
“Can the opinion of certain recent scholars be admitted, who either deny that the primary end of marriage is the generation and education of children, or teach that secondary ends are not essentially subordinate to the primary end, but are equally principal and dependent on it?” They answered: Negative. On April 30, 1944, Pope Pius XII approved the decree.
The 1951 Address to Midwives
Pope Pius XII referenced the 1944 Rota decision in his famous Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession. Delivered on October 29, 1951, this address became famous because of a few sentences it contained that theologians and Pope Paul VI would later use to support Natural Family Planning (NFP). The irony is that this address was much more focused on teaching the primary purpose of marriage, which is almost always ignored by the same people promoting NFP.
In this address, Pope Pius XII reaffirmed the teachings of Pius XI in Casti Connubii on the ends of marriage, and particularly the 1944 Rota decree:
“Now, the truth is that matrimony, as an institution of nature, in virtue of the Creator’s will, has not as a primary and intimate end the personal perfection of the married couple but the procreation and upbringing of a new life. The other ends, inasmuch as they are intended by nature, are not equally primary, much less superior to the primary end, but are essentially subordinated to it.”
As Pius XII goes on to emphasize, this does not reduce the conjugal act to “a mere organic function for the transmission of seed,” most certainly it involves the personal interaction between husband and wife, rational creatures with free will made in the image and likeness of God. This is why he teaches midwives to
“Advise the fiancée or the young married woman who comes to seek your advice about the values of matrimonial life that these personal values, both in the sphere of the body and the senses and in the sphere of the spirit, are truly genuine, but that the Creator has placed them not in the first, but in the second degree of the scale of values.”
I believe the key to understanding what Pius XII is trying to teach is that marriage has multiple ends or purposes, which include not just procreation but also ends that serve the good of spouses. Where the error enters the equation is that the hierarchy of these ends is abolished or even turned on its head. It is the hierarchy of ends that has been lost with the modern theologians, including as we shall see, with those at the Vatican II.
By the way, Ludwig Ott confirmed this understanding of the hierarchy of ends in his famous Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma in 1954. According to Ott, the primary purpose of marriage is “the generation and bringing up of offspring. The secondary purpose is mutual help and the morally regulated satisfaction of the sex urge.” This is considered Sententia Certa – theologically certain – although not explicitly defined by the Church as dogmatic, it is considered Church doctrine and must be believed.[9]
Hierarchy of Ends Disappears at Vatican II
The teachings of Pius XI and Pius XII came under attack at Vatican II. Specifically, with regard to Article 21 of the fourth chapter of Schema XIII, the doctrine that there is a hierarchy of ends in marriage was eliminated from the discussion. According to Roberto de Mattai, the purpose of avoiding the distinction between the primary and secondary ends of marriage was to accomplish a political purpose—reversing the Church’s prohibition on birth control.[10]
The chief enemy of the doctrine on the ends of marriage at the Council was Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens. To a commission he persuaded Pope John XXIII to create to address the issue of birth control, Suenens stated:
“It may be that we have accentuated the verse from scripture, ‘Increase and multiply,’ to the point of obscuring the other divine command, ‘And the two shall be one flesh.’ It will be up to the commission to tell us whether we have not overemphasized the first end, which is procreation, to the detriment of an equally imperative purpose, which is growth in the marital union (emphasis added).”[11]
Notice how Suenens just assumed “marital union” was equal to procreation. Suenen’s agenda became immediately obvious to others at the Council. In response to the attempted hijacking of Church doctrine on marriage, Cardinal Michael Browne responded with a discourse on the traditional Church teaching. This teaching is based on the fundamental principle that
“The primary end, the primary end of the work, as they say, is the generation and education of children; The secondary end is twofold: a) the mutual help, or the mutual services rendered by the spouses to each other in the domestic partnership; b) the remedy to concupiscence…there is no doubt whatsoever that all this belongs to the treasury of common doctrine of the great theologians ….”[12]
Sadly, the modernists won out at Vatican II. As was the case in so many other areas of doctrine, Vatican II did not explicitly reject the traditional Catholic opinion on the ends of marriage—just simply ignored it and taught something else.
Schema XIII, which became in its final form Gaudium et spes, in the section dedicated to “Fostering the Nobility of Marriage and the Family,” reads, in relevant part,
“By their very nature, the institution of matrimony itself and conjugal love are ordained for the procreation and education of children, and find in them their ultimate crown. Thus a man and a woman, who by their compact of conjugal love “are no longer two, but one flesh” (Matt. 19:ff), render mutual help and service to each other through an intimate union of their persons and of their actions. Through this union they experience the meaning of their oneness and attain to it with growing perfection day by day. As a mutual gift of two persons, this intimate union and the good of the children impose total fidelity on the spouses and argue for an unbreakable oneness between them (emphasis added).”[13]
This is a perfect example of the treachery that went into the drafting of so many Vatican II documents. We know from the history, as outlined above, that there was a debate among certain Vatican II bishops over contraception and how marriage would be defined in light of that debate. The conciliar statement concerning the purpose of marriage included the ends of marriage as traditionally defined but ignored that there is a hierarchy of ends with procreation and education of children as the primary end to which all other ends must be subservient.
The ends of marriage (procreation, mutual aid, and remedy for concupiscence) are bound up together into one package of “mutual gift” and “intimate union” without delineating the point that the secondary ends serve the primary end. There is no reference whatsoever to primary and secondary ends. Rather, as the 1944 Rota specifically and directly warned against, the document goes out of its way to avoid using language of primary and secondary ends and conflates procreation with “intimate union” and “mutual gift” that leads to “perfection” of the couple.
Paul VI and Humanae Vitae
Citing explicitly to Vatican II, in his encyclical Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI continues the eradication of the hierarchy of ends in marriage and conflates them under one big umbrella of “mutual gift.”
“[H]usband and wife, through that mutual gift of themselves, which is specific and exclusive to them alone, develop that union of two persons in which they perfect one another, cooperating with God in the generation and rearing of new lives.”[14]
Observe the key modernist phrases being employed with the description of marriage: “mutual gift,” “union of two persons”, and “perfect one another.” These terms match up explicitly with the modernist conception of the purpose of marriage condemned in the 1944 Rota decision and in Pius XII’s Address to Midwives concerning the purposes of marriage.
Of course, Paul VI cites to the Address to Midwives in his support of NFP in the same encyclical but conveniently ignores the clear teaching of Pius XII that the hierarchy of ends in marriage must be maintained.[15]
This is all to show that when the errors of the new theology (Nouvelle Théologie) previously condemned were implicitly accepted at Vatican II and adopted by Paul VI and John Paul II, the authentic understanding of marriage has been destroyed in a revolt against clear and consistent Catholic Tradition.
Changes in Canon Law
This revolt against the Church’s teaching on marriage naturally led to significant and equally destructive changes in canon law. Look at the differences.
According to the Code of Canon Law of 1917,
“Matrimonial consent is an act of the will by which each party gives and accepts perpetual and exclusive rights to the body, for those actions that are of themselves suitable for the generation of children.”[16]
This canon, specifically referenced in Pope Pius XI’s Casti Connubii, defined what a couple consents to when contracting marriage. That is, marriage is a permanent (perpetual) contract made with only one person (exclusive) for exchange of conjugal rights (rights to the body) for the purpose of procreation (generation of children.)
This definition of matrimonial consent corresponds perfectly to the Church’s doctrine on the primary purpose of marriage, which is the procreation and education of children. There is nothing in this definition about “spousal love,” “gift of self,” or “perfection of the couple.” That is because those concepts are novelties introduced into the modernist Catholic lexicon later in the twentieth century.
Now, compare that with the modern version of the same canon from the 1983 Code of Canon Law,[17]
“Matrimonial consent is an act of the will by which a man and a woman mutually give and accept each other through an irrevocable covenant in order to establish marriage.”[18]
One can still discern the permanence (irrevocable) and exclusive (a man and a woman) nature of the matrimonial consent, but noticeably missing is an exchange of bodily rights for the generation of children.
Instead of reference to procreation, we instead see mutual gifts (mutually give and accept each other). This new definition reflects the doctrinal inversion of the ends of marriage as we saw occur at Vatican II and in Humane Vitae.
The 1983 Code reflects the elimination of the hierarchy of the ends of marriage, and in fact, replaces the exchange of bodily rights for the purpose of procreation with the exchange of “mutual gift.”
One may contend that mutual gift can and does include the idea of exchanging bodily rights because a total gift of self (a common phrase used in Theology of Body) necessarily entails the giving of oneself physically, but includes a lot more too.
The reason why this is not just an inaccurate reflection of true Catholic doctrine, as has already been shown, but is also a major attack on the institution of marriage itself is because it imposes a definition onto marriage that no one can possibly consent to such that it is legally binding. How does one mutually consent to “give and accept each other?” What does that mean?
Well, the Church attempted to explain what such a defect in consent would like in the following canons, especially Canon 1095, which dictates “the following are incapable of contracting marriage:
- those who lack the sufficient use of reason;
- those who suffer from a grave defect of discretion of judgment concerning the essential matrimonial rights and duties mutually to be handed over and accepted; and
- those who are not able to assume the essential obligations of marriage for causes of a psychic nature.”
How convenient for those seeking an annulment to say the person they were married to did not at the time the marriage was contracted understand matrimonial rights and duties or was not psychological capable of contracting marriage because they did not understand what “mutual gift” was or were incapable of giving of themselves totally as a gift. Does anyone understand what it means to exchange oneself as a “mutual gift,” or as Theology of the Body would say, “total gift of self?”
The concept of “mutual gift” as the object of matrimonial consent is both too broad and narrow at the same time to have any legal meaning that a couple could possibly agree to. It is too broad because mutual gift could mean absolutely anything. Emotional feelings or washing each other’s dirty dishes maybe? What about sharing chores around the house? Maybe Bill wasn’t upholding his marital duties by doing his share of the chores and rudely expecting Sally to do all the chores while he watches sports?
At the same time, “mutual gift” is too narrow because it doesn’t specifically mention the rights over the body like the 1917 Code. Maybe Bill wants as many children as possible, but Sally for good reasons in her own mind only wants three, and so she withholds the marital debt? If Bill insists that he has a right over Sally’s body for the generation of children, is that now a reason for an annulment if this disagreement is irreconcilable?
All of this leads to a completely unworkable definition of the object of consent in marriage, which necessarily opens the door to finding any reason as a basis for an annulment under Canon 1095.
This, I contend, is the cause for the super-majority of annulments in the Church today, which did not exist before Vatican II when the ends of marriage were properly understood and taught in a hierarchical way.
Conclusion
To summarize, since the time of Christ, the Church understood the primary purpose or end of marriage to be the procreation and education of children. Pope Pius XI in Casti Connubii made it clear that not only was the generation of new life the primary end of marriage, but there was a hierarchy of ends, to which the secondary ends were subordinated. These secondary ends of spousal mutual aid, and remedy for concupiscence, while independent ends in themselves, necessarily must serve the primary end of procreation and education of children.
This hierarchy of matrimonial ends was not simply obiter dictum, or a passing side note. The1944 Rota decision and Pope Pius XII, in his Address to Midwives, made it clear that there was a concerted effort by modernist theologians to destroy this hierarchy of ends or even reverse it. He condemned any such attempts. And yet, that is exactly what happened at Vatican II and thereafter.
As a result, the canonical definition of the object of matrimonial consent was changed from one that was crystal clear on the object being the exchange of bodily rights for the generation of children to “mutual gift”—a nebulous but pretty sounding concept incapable of being applied in a legal sense, but one that could be manipulated to mean whatever one wants.
This definitional change to the 1917 Code, now found in the 1983 Code, allowed the Church’s tribunals to find a basis for granting annulments upon application for just about any reason. In the past, the consent needed for a valid marriage referred to the exchange of bodily rights for the purpose of having babies—obviously, very specific and easy to understand. Now, because “mutual gift” can be anything to anyone, defects in consent are ubiquitous and can be found in almost every case brought before a marriage tribunal.
All of this to say, if we truly want to defend marriage and the family, this will require reducing the number of annulments. And to do that, it is going to require a radical return to the authentic and true Catholic teaching on marriage both doctrinally and in canon law itself, to accurately reflect the purpose of marriage and defend it as an institution.
[1] I will use the term “annulment” throughout this article to refer to Declarations of Nullity for simplicity sake.
[2] Ziegler, J. J. “Annulment Nation,” April 28, 2011. https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2011/04/28/annulment-nation/.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Somers, M. “Annulments plummet among U.S. Catholics amid fewer marriages, divorces,” The Washington Times October 15, 2014. https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/oct/15/annulments-plummet-among-us-catholics-amid-fewer-m/
[5] Pius XI, Casti Connubii, 17.
[6] Ibid., 59.
[7] “Acta Apostolicae Sedis Commentarium Officiale.” Acta Apostolicae Sedis Xi (January 20, 1944): 1–8. https://www.vatican.va/archive/aas/documents/AAS-36-1944-ocr.pdf.
[8] Ibid. (using Google translation).
[9] Ott, Ludwig. Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma: St. Louis, Mo., B. Herder Book Co (1954), 460.
[10] De Mattei, Roberto. The Second Vatican Council: An Unwritten Story, 2012, 389-60.
[11] Ibid., 393.
[12] Ibid., 396.
[13] “Gaudium Et Spes,”, 48. https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html.
[14] Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, 8.
[15] One could persuasively argue that Paul VI needed to eliminate any reference to hierarchy of matrimonial ends in order to promote NFP as a legitimate Catholic version of birth control, and is now seen as a positive Catholic value. See Farrell, John. YouTube. “Annulment Proof,” n.d. https://www.youtube.com/@AnnulmentProof.
[16] Canon 1081 § 2. “The 1917 or Pio-Benedictine Code of Canon Law”
[17] The Code of Canon Law (CIC) 1983 was not the first legal change concerning annulments after Vatican II. In 1970 the U.S. bishops requested and secured from Rome permission to use special, streamlined rules of procedure (called the ‘American Procedural Norms’) which radically reduced the time, paperwork, and red tape involved in resolving annulment cases.
[18] CIC (1983) Canon 1057 § 2.