Your Marriage Is Valid; Your Declaration of Nullity Is Not

Tens of thousands of marriages have been declared null by U. S. Catholic diocesan marriage tribunals since the 1970s. Prominent tribunal judges like Msgr. Edward M. Egan of the Roman Rota and Msgr. Clarence J. Hettinger of the Peoria, Illinois, tribunal have argued that the so-called new grounds for nullity of marriage since Vatican II are themselves invalid. Other authors have made the point as well that the Church cannot use so-called personalist grounds for declaring marriages null without destroying the very idea of marriage. Sheila Rauch Kennedy wrote Shattered Faith in 1997 about her struggle with the Catholic Church's effort to declare null her marriage to Joe Kennedy. In 1998, Professor Robert H. Vasoli of Notre Dame University wrote What God Has Joined Together, The Annulment Crisis in American Catholicism. Both authors successfully defended the validity of their own marriages. In 2000, Pierre Hegy and Joseph Martos, both university professors, published Catholic Divorce, The Deception of Annulments, showing that the more than one hundredfold increase in granting of declarations of nullity in the Catholic Church since Vatican II is deceitful, hypocritical, scandalous and represents "virtual divorce." Your Marriage Is Valid; Your Declaration of Nullity Is not Valid is like a short, clear, TV commercial version of the arguments against the U. S. Tribunals' authority to ruin family life for millions of Catholics. Most of all the children.