All the Days of My Life

When Suzanne and I perceived that we may be called to marriage and started talking about it, one of the things that was abundantly clear from the get-go was that we were both in it for life. No matter what happened, divorce was never going to be an option; never even a consideration on the table. We would pull through it. We trust that through our God, love, and patience, our marriage can and will weather all storms.

We're thankful for the example of both sets of our parents, who have accomplished that to-date in their lives too... and we're confident that's where this ethic comes from.

And we're mindful that for some, even with the best and loftiest of intentions, certain marriages weren't really to be. The Church recognizes that too, of course. Despite that, though, I earnestly read what Pope Benedict XVI had to say yesterday, cautioning the Church's tribunals to avoid becoming lax in the review of annulment cases...

Granting marriage annulments too easily and without real cause plays
into a modern form of pessimism that basically says human beings are
not able to make lifelong commitments to loving another person, Pope
Benedict XVI said.

"We run the risk of falling into an
anthropological pessimism which, in the light of today's cultural
situation, considers it almost impossible to marry," the pope said in a
speech Jan. 29 to members of the Tribunal of the Roman Rota.

Pope
Benedict said there is still a need to deal with a problem Pope John
Paul II pointed out in a 1987 speech to the Roman Rota, that of saving
the church community from "the scandal of seeing the value of Christian
marriage destroyed in practice by the exaggerated and almost automatic
multiplication of declarations of nullity."

Pope Benedict said
he agreed with Pope John Paul that too often members of church
tribunals see a failed marriage and grant the annulment on the basis of
an ill-defined case of "immaturity or psychic weakness."

According
to canon law, the validity of a marriage requires that both the man and
woman freely and publicly consent to the union and that they have the
psychological capacity to assume the obligations of marriage.

Pope
Benedict said tribunal judges must remember there is a difference
between the full maturity and understanding that people should strive
to develop over time and "canonical maturity, which is the minimum
point of departure for the validity of a marriage."

In addition,
he said, granting an annulment on the basis of the "psychic incapacity"
of the husband or wife requires that the tribunal establish and
document the fact that the person had a serious psychological or
psychiatric problem at the time the wedding was celebrated.

There's more at this story at CNS.