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What’s the problem with annulments?

Is canon law setting Catholic couples up for failure? Take our survey?
In the Pews

Like too many people, I did not grow up with the benefit of observing a healthy relationship between my parents. I met my first spouse mere weeks after I found out my father was having an affair, after years of my mother confiding in me about their marital woes. My first mother-in-law was widowed when her eldest child was only 4 years old and never remarried. I hoped when we completed pre-marital counseling with our priest and diocesan programs that it would equip us for a lasting marriage. This was the first of many hopes about marriage that Catholic canon law would contribute to dashing.


Despite knowing we were a couple lacking marriage role models, the priest in charge of our marriage preparation focused on schooling us in Catholic teachings against contraception and IVF, and the importance of self-sacrifice. We both found this pre-Cana experience to be an absurd hurdle to a Catholic wedding, but we didn’t have any choice.

Immediately after the wedding, it became clear that we did not know how to negotiate the give-and-take of living with each other or a sexual relationship. When I tried to follow the priest’s advice to sacrifice my own desires for the good of the marriage, I did not realize I was implicitly giving my spouse permission to be even less responsible and caring. After getting laid off, my spouse also started spiraling into depression and substance abuse. I had agreed to delay starting a family when we first got married because I was attending law school, but after a couple of years futilely trying to pull the relationship out of this tailspin, I concluded it would not be fair to any children to bring them into a dysfunctional family. I asked for a divorce, and we handled the civil aspects of our split quickly and amicably.

I wish pastoral care in the wake of this had consisted of encouraging me to go to individual therapy so I could have a trusted professional to guide me in healthy relationship dynamics. Instead, I got the tutelage of canon law and annulment procedures. I tried marriage again with a partner who embraced Catholic teachings on marriage. This union turned out to be no more harmonious—only longer and harder to end after we’d had children together.

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When first-time brides and grooms say “I do,” they usually only have a vague sense of what they’re agreeing to do, and even less understanding of how they might be held accountable if they don’t. Like a terms of use agreement required for accessing popular digital content, most people never bother to look into the details of their “consent” because they are eager to access the benefits and know they can’t bargain for a different deal anyway. This is especially true for marriage in the Catholic Church, governed by canon law that refuses to recognize any contradictory prenuptial agreements or civil laws.

Those terms of use are ignored until something goes wrong and generates serious conflict, and when they are finally looked at, they inevitably favor the more powerful party. Likewise, when Catholics get divorced, especially if they are seeking a marriage do-over, they discover that their consent was directed to the Vatican’s canon law more than it was to each other. They have to play within the rules of the marriage tribunal system to get an annulment, or give up on being full communicants in the Catholic Church, or resign themselves to never being partnered again.

Canon law states coldly what participants in a Catholic marriage have agreed to: “marriage is a permanent partnership between a man and a woman ordered to the procreation of offspring by means of some sexual cooperation.” And while “good of the spouses” also gets a passing mention, nothing in the canon law actually promotes that good or even holds a person accountable for harming their spouse.

Ex-spouses who seek a Catholic annulment must identify some “defect” at the outset of the marriage to justify it. In a healthy relationship, spouses are growing in love and maturity together, so that whatever “defects” exist in their marriage at the beginning are gradually replaced with something better and stronger. A failed marriage may have appeared strong at the beginning but slid downhill because one or both spouses acted hurtfully later. When the Catholic Church scrutinizes the start of the marriage for imperfections to explain later failures, it sets upside-down expectations for the trajectory of a relationship and doesn’t hold spouses accountable for their actions that lead to breakdown.  

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Canon law and Catholic teaching encouraged me to blame our marriage failure on my first spouse’s reluctance to have children. This was “excluding an essential property of marriage” and therefore could explain why we didn’t experience any “sacramental graces” in our relationship. In retrospect, it was a grace that we didn’t conceive any children together. The focus on procreation in canon law also sends the message to older and infertile couples that their marriages are less meaningful.

But the heart of the problem with canonical Catholic marriage is its oxymoronic notion of “irrevocable consent.” There is no condition occurring after a marriage is validly consecrated, not even egregious wrongs committed by the other spouse, that allows a married person to withdraw consent according to the Catholic Church. Though canon law allows separation for adultery or “grave mental or physical danger,” it emphasizes that the clergy should urge the spouses to reunite despite the harm one may have done to the other.

Labeling continued cohabitation and sexual relations as the superior moral choice, no matter how strained the relationship, impedes the type of free and continuous consent that is indispensable for a healthy sexual relationship. Even if there is more to sexual morality than consent, at a bare minimum, sexual “consent” is not real or present if the participants are being pressured by the other or a third party, including their church, or if it cannot be withdrawn. To put it bluntly, discouraging separation is spiritually abusive sexual coercion.

In the hands of clergy with no personal experience of marriage, the metaphor of a married couple becoming “one flesh” is often drawn out to erase the separate personhood of the spouses. Though couched in gender-neutral terms as mutual “giving,” in practice it is similar to the English common law notion of coverture, in which wives’ human rights and responsibilities are subsumed under the “cover” of their husbands’ representation of the marital unit. In contemporary terms, the marriage tribunal adjudicating my second annulment posed this leading question in its questionnaire: “Did you consider your former spouse as your highest priority? Or were other values (i.e., education, career, family, friends) of equal or greater importance?”

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What the Catholic Church is proposing as the “right answer” to this question would be called “enmeshment” or “codependency” by mental health professionals. But marriage tribunals often twist the significance of seeking mental health treatment, regarding it as evidence that the spouse getting help was the source of the “defect.” The clergy presiding over marriage and annulment discourage Catholics from discovering in therapy how toxic these notions of marriage are, by labeling the person going as being the one at “fault” for marital failure.

Catholic canon law desperately needs to be updated for the modern, companionate model of marriage. The mutual good of the spouses should be centered instead of procreation. Clergy should support Catholics who discern the need for separation for the good of themselves or their children, instead of trying to dissuade them. And the fact that a couple has already obtained a civil divorce should be treated as conclusive proof that their union was not “indissoluble” in the first place. Until canon law is overhauled to support human flourishing, it deserves the same level of credence as a Disney+ subscription agreement.



Image: Unsplash/Siora Photography

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About the author

H. L. Norwich

H. L. Norwich is a financial planner in the Washington, D.C. metro area. They are a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law and practiced law and government relations, focused on tax and financial services, before transitioning to a career in financial advising.

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