Anna (her name is changed here for safety reasons) was in a decades long marriage that she came to understand as emotionally abusive. When people outside of her family and circle began to point out the harmful dynamics to her, “I thankfully learned to understand what was going on in my household with my husband’s behavior toward myself and my children,” she says.
After getting divorced, Anna’s ex initiated the annulment process in the church, and Anna chose to participate. But Anna felt dismissed and disheartened by how the judges engaged with her petition.
The annulment process, she found, “can be almost complicit in assisting the abusive individual to continue mistreatment of the other spouse,” she says, because the process relies a lot on individual testimonies. “A lot of times [the judges] take the word of the spouses, and that can be very unsettling,” which in her case involved a “partner who’s writing intentionally dishonestly because he thinks that might enable him to get an annulment.”
In the statements for the annulment decision, one of the judges “made the comment that abuse was overused,” Anna says. “People assume that someone would be just throwing that term around. But I think it’s important for everyday Catholics and everybody in our society to understand that if someone uses that term, we should see if they need help.”
Father David Klein, the judicial vicar for the Diocese of Camden, New Jersey, says of all annulment cases he sees, “over 50 percent of the cases involve some kind of abuse, manipulation, or control of one party over the other, whether that’s physical, verbal, or emotional.” He continues on to say, “It’s a very prominent experience that I’ve noticed over the years,” most commonly emotional and verbal abuse.
Similarly, in Chicago, Father Chuck Dahm, who directs Domestic Violence Outreach, where he accompanies survivors of domestic violence, says judges in the Chicago tribunal told him that about half of all annulment cases are connected to domestic violence.
“I would like to see more people that have been educated to understand what could be going wrong in a marriage and a family, recognize those signs, and then know how to help those people,” Anna says.
Kelsey Leick, a mother and sales coordinator in Omaha, Nebraska, went through the annulment process a few years ago. Based on how other Catholics reacted to her story, she believes “there’s a really fundamental misunderstanding of divorce and annulment in the church,” she says.
This misunderstanding has caused a lot of pain, according to Leick. For Catholics, including those who haven’t experienced divorce or annulments firsthand, knowing what annulments are, what the process entails, and listening to the stories of those who have gone through them can help foster a culture of greater mercy and understanding in the church.
What is an annulment?
Klein says he often tells people that an annulment “is not a Catholic divorce.” When someone petitions a tribunal to have their former marriage annulled, “we’re looking at whether or not these two people validly entered a sacramental marriage,” he says.
An annulment is also called a declaration of nullity, meaning “there never was a marriage. It was null from the beginning,” Dahm says. Because marriage is a sacrament that can’t be broken, “it can only be declared never formed,” he says.
Laura Morrison, a canon lawyer and part-time tribunal judge, says the annulment process examines “what was in the minds of the parties at the time they said, ‘I do.’” About 65 percent of Morrison’s clients are non-Catholics seeking to convert who must gain annulments to be able to do so, she says.
There are different “grounds” for an annulment, meaning a declaration of nullity has to fall into certain criteria. The most common grounds for a declaration of nullity are ignorance (someone was unaware of how the church understands marriage and desired something contrary to that understanding such as an open marriage), inability (they were not free to enter a marriage, whether through coercion, addiction, or inability to consent to a marriage), or insincerity (someone was not planning to be faithful or not willing to commit to what the church asks spouses to commit to, such as refusing to be open to having children).
“We’d investigate their family of origin, their adolescence, whether or not there was any kind of family trauma or dysfunction that could have affected their ability to make a rational decision regarding marriage to a particular person at a particular time,” Klein says.
There are also different kinds of annulments, including documentary and formal cases. Documentary cases are a bit simpler, Morrison says: “For example, if you were baptized Catholic and you were married outside the church, like on a forest preserve or in another faith tradition, without having received a dispensation permission, the marriage is not valid. You can prove that with different documentary information.”
If that doesn’t apply, then there must be a formal or solemn case involving a trial and investigation of the marriage process. “It can go on for a very, very long time, inordinately sometimes,” Morrison says. During that time, “people are in limbo about being able to marry or being able to come into the church. It’s hard on people.” Morrison says both spouses do not need to agree to an annulment for it to be granted.
Another question Klein gets a lot is around children: “We do not declare any children illegitimate,” he says. “That is a civil consideration, because a child’s birth certificate is not given to them by a church; it is given to them by the state. So we have no ability to decide the legitimacy or illegitimacy of any children born in a marriage.”
The judges who investigate the process make up a tribunal court. Klein, who is a judicial vicar, is required to have a canon law degree. Judges can be clergy or laypeople, but they must have a degree in canon law. Each diocese has its own tribunal court, and they have a chain of hierarchical authority that goes up all the way to the Vatican appeals court, the Roman Rota. Most of the cases tribunals handle center around annulments, though they also see cases around clergy sexual abuse, parish mergers, and more.
“Tribunals are the church court of the bishop of the diocese,” Klein says. “Church government is set up in a similar way to our civil government, with the executive, judicial, and legislative power centered in the bishop.” The judicial vicar must be a priest because “they share in that direct judicial power of the bishop himself.”
There are also volunteers, called advocates, who have been trained throughout dioceses to help people begin the paperwork for annulments. They don’t need a canon law degree, yet not every diocese has advocates, Klein says.
History of annulments
While earlier theologians talked about the meaning of marriage and referred to it as a sacrament, the Catholic Church added marriage as an official sacrament in 1563. During the Council of Trent, marriage was written into canon law and became the seventh sacrament.
Dahm says that before marriage was declared a sacrament, bishops and priests would witness and bless a marriage, though it wasn’t a general rule that they had to.
“If you go back to the period between 1000 and 1500, all marriages were civil,” Dahm says. “Marriage wasn’t a sacrament. What does a sacrament mean? It means it reflects Christ’s love for the church. Christ’s love for the church is unbreakable. So if marriage reflects that, then marriage is unbreakable.” This understanding of marriage wasn’t common until the Council of Trent.
Even before marriage was considered a sacrament, the church recognized that “not everyone entered valid marriages,” Klein says. They still used annulments, though the process has changed over the years. The most famous case is that of Henry VIII, who requested an annulment from his first wife in 1527, which the pope refused.
Annulments are not new in the history of the church, but their “use has certainly blossomed exponentially in the last century or so,” Klein says.
It is important to emphasize to those going through the annulment process that “the church is not nullifying your wedding; they’re only recognizing that it never existed as a sacrament,” Dahm says. “That’s an important distinction, because that empowers laypeople to say, ‘I don’t need the church to tell me that my marriage was not a sacrament; I lived it, and I know it wasn’t.’”
Klein says as difficult as the annulment process can be, he has seen how it can be healing. People walk into his office “looking like they’re carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders,” he says. “But by opening up about what has happened to them and what led them to make the decision they did to get married, it helps them gain some insight in saying, ‘I made a mistake, but I am not a mistake.’ That can be the beauty of the process handled well.”
Personal stories
Joe Pagetta, a father, writer, and museum worker in Nashville, initially dropped out of the annulment process and picked it back up years later. When he wanted to get remarried after his divorce, he asked his parish priest about the possibility of getting an annulment. His priest told him there was only one route he could go, which was to rely on psychological grounds that would require expert witnesses of therapists or psychologists, he says.
“What was presented to me felt hurtful to my former wife,” he says. “Divorce is painful enough. It seemed odd that I would go back to her three years later with this ground for annulment. It just didn’t seem like an option. That’s when [the priest] told me that I couldn’t receive communion if I decided to get remarried.”
Pagetta chose to get remarried outside the church and didn’t pursue an annulment. “I did receive communion at different places. But after a while, it sort of feels like you’re running away from the law,” he says. One day, that same priest called him out for receiving communion.
A few years later, his twin daughters were preparing for their first communion, and Pagetta decided to revisit the annulment process. This time, when he picked the petition back up, the priest who helped him noted that because Pagetta’s first wife was previously married, she wasn’t free to marry Pagetta, so the marriage was invalid. “The fact that no one told me that until I had spent two or three years going down this other path was frustrating to me,” he says.
From his experience going through the process, Pagetta says, “It doesn’t seem like anyone has looked at [the annulment process] in decades. Human nature probably hasn’t changed much in decades, but the circumstances in which we live have certainly changed.”
Leick says her experience of getting an annulment was overall positive and came as a relief. Leick was married for over nine years and found out her former spouse had been cheating on her with men. Leick decided to file for an annulment and met with a deacon through the Archdiocese of Omaha.
“My ex and I had a pretty amicable divorce, and we’ve always been civil or friendly,” she says. “Obviously, he was in a place where he wasn’t going to get remarried in the Catholic Church. But he knew that that was something that I was open to in the future, so he went along with it.”
Leick finished the paperwork in a few hours. The judges wanted to investigate psychological grounds with her ex—he had been seeing a Catholic counselor for most of their marriage, and “part of what they were doing in that counseling relationship was working on his ‘same-sex attraction,’ ” Leick says. “I don’t like using that phrase now, but that’s what they called it.”
The judges asked Leick’s ex to sign a release so they could talk to his therapist. “The implication was, if we don’t talk to his therapist, we don’t have enough information to grant this annulment,” she says. “Requiring that was just weird and uncomfortable.”
The way fellow Catholics reacted to her divorce, however, was more painful than going through the annulment process. Some Catholics “like to say that getting divorced is a sin,” she says. But tribunals require someone to be civilly divorced before they can seek an annulment.
“It also hurts to hear Catholics say that divorce is worse for my kids. In my circumstance, I had people tell me that I needed to stay to ‘fix’ my ex-husband. I had people tell me that it was a sin to get divorced, but also I couldn’t expose my children to my ex-husband’s lifestyle, so I needed to make sure that I got full custody. None of this made any sense to me,” she says.
Leick says she has a “positive coparenting relationship” with her ex. “I would rather have my children in the situation that they’re in right now than still be married and have my kids living in an unhappy home, which is going to come with its own trauma,” she says. “Unless you’re living in that marriage, you don’t know what’s going on.”
Patty Breen, a writer and director of mission services at a Catholic hospital in Michigan, got married in her 20s and was divorced by 31. Because she worked in parish ministry, she was familiar with the annulment process and found her own process healing. “I know not every Catholic finds it that way. I’m glad I did it; I think it’s important to look at a marriage and take responsibility for that version of yourself, to look at why it didn’t work,” she says.
As Breen has “talked to many women over the years and written about it online and spoken about it publicly, I do believe the annulment process exists out of God’s mercy,” she says. “Divorced people aren’t bad. Jesus doesn’t hate divorced people. He hates that divorce exists, but sometimes that’s the only option.”
She points out that people are marrying less and getting married older. “The church has to take this into consideration” and offer “better resources to support divorced people, even civilly remarried people, because sometimes they have reasons for doing that, too,” she says.
Beverly Willett, a lawyer and mother who converted to Catholicism after her divorce, says she is “still married as far as the Catholic Church goes.” After Willett became Catholic, she asked her priest about obtaining an annulment and researched possible grounds. She ended up not pursuing one, because she did not want to reach back out to her ex—who had had an affair—and felt like a declaration of nullity of her marriage wasn’t authentic to how she felt about the marriage vows she upheld. “I believed that my vow was independent of his,” she says.
Willett says there needs to be more support in the annulment process for the “people who are faithful to their marriages.”
An important step to improving the annulment process is to have “hard data,” Willett says, about the percentages of annulments that are being pursued, how many are granted and not granted, the reasons why people drop out, and more.
Dahm is also frustrated at the lack of record keeping. He emphasizes that there is no study of marriage tribunals in the United States on a national, large-scale level. “They all operate individually,” he says.
Anna understands why people might drop out of the annulment process or even leave the church because of it. “If I didn’t have a strong dedication to my faith, I may have also been in the same situation, because it didn’t feel as if I was being supported,” she says.
Dahm has known numerous survivors of domestic violence who have dropped out of the annulment process because they find it retraumatizing, he says. Similarly, Klein most often hears that people drop out because the process was “too painful for them to resurface a lot of those old emotions and relive the experiences,” he says.
Anna says she wouldn’t mind seeing people pay on a sliding scale for their annulment and those funds going toward training people on tribunals about domestic violence and abuse.
Payment for annulments depends on the diocese. Leick didn’t have to pay and says the Archdiocese of Omaha wouldn’t even accept goodwill gestures, which she appreciated, because “in an annulment, everyone should have equal footing.”
In Camden, the fees for an annulment are $800, Klein says. “It does cost thousands of dollars for annulments to be processed; however, most tribunals are heavily subsidized by their dioceses.”
Part of the reforms Pope Francis made for annulments in 2015 was “challenging all tribunals not to make any assessments or fees applicable to the annulment process. We haven’t quite reached that point, but our fees have not increased,” Klein says.
Anna hopes that tribunals will start offering surveys for people seeking annulments and going through the process, asking: “Did you feel heard? How did you feel about the Catholic Church when you started? How did you feel about the Catholic Church when you finished the process?” She says, “People who are actually establishing these processes, they likely don’t know what it feels like to go through the experience. It’s good to have insights from all these people.”
Understanding abuse
Dahm believes the Canon Law Society of America should take more seriously that so many annulment cases are connected to abuse and advocate for trainings for judges. Klein says the Camden tribunal hasn’t had specific training about abuse. “Certainly [abuse] would be an excellent topic for us to address,” he says.
Because tribunals are required to examine the relationship at the time of the wedding, they don’t always consider the fact that abuse happens over time. The requirement to have witnesses can also be a barrier for some victims of domestic violence, Dahm says. He recalls a case where an abusive spouse wouldn’t let his wife have a job, go to school, have friends, or leave their apartment.
Dahm helped her fill out the questionnaire for the annulment, a process that ended up taking three years. “Because she was kept sequestered, she could not find any witnesses,” Dahm says. “I thought it was outrageous—they didn’t believe her.”
A lot of times, priests don’t know parishioners are experiencing domestic violence, Dahm says. He often tells priests the statistics that 1 in 4 women and 1 in 9 men are victims of domestic violence. If there are 400 people in the pews on Sunday, statistically, “that’s huge. You’ve got dozens and dozens of people who have experienced this, or are experiencing it today, and you never say anything about it.”
Dahm received a call recently from a victim of domestic violence who said her priest told her to do everything she can to save her marriage because that’s the most important thing for her and her children. “I said, no, it isn’t,” Dahm says. “Your safety is, and the safety of your children is. But there are priests saying this, because they value the sanctity and the indissolubility of marriage more than they value the safety of the victim.”
Although he experienced deep relief at getting his annulment, “it doesn’t take away the pain,” Pagetta says. “I feel very lucky that I was able to pick up the petition again. I was able to talk to the right people who helped me. But there are so many folks who have not.”
“There seemed to be a lot of judgment in my process and not a lot of mercy,” Pagetta says. “There are a lot of folks out there, I think, who could use some mercy.”
This article also appears in the November 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 11, page 26-30). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
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