Marriage Annulment and False Mercy

Pope Leo XIV recently told participants in a juridical-pastoral formation course of the Roman Rota that the process of matrimonial annulments is not just a “means aimed solely at obtaining the free status of persons.” Rather, this sacred power by the ecclesiastical tribunal must first be exercised “in the service of truth.” “Every faithful person, every family, every community,” Leo said, “needs truth about their ecclesial situation in order to walk well the path of faith and charity. The truth about personal and community rights is situated in this context: the juridical truth declared in ecclesiastical processes is an aspect of existential truth within the Church.” Otherwise, the process ends up operating “on the basis of a misunderstood compassion . . . but human judgment on the nullity of marriage cannot however be manipulated by false mercy.”

Leo is correct—and my own annulment experience bears this out. Eleven years ago, I wrote in these pages of my conversion from Calvinism to Catholicism. And the “day my soul became Catholic” was “the day I found out that as a divorced and remarried woman I could not receive Communion.” The realization and restriction impressed upon me the “real authority” of the Catholic Church and the doctrine of marriage. I vowed that even if I was never able to take Communion, I would never turn away from the Church.

During my annulment process, I didn’t know how things would turn out, but I trusted that God would work his judgment through the diocesan tribunal, and I was fully prepared to accept the consequences if they decided not to grant it. I trusted God’s judgment to work through the members of the tribunal because I believed unshakably the words of Pope Benedict XVI, which Pope Leo XIV reiterated: “The canonical proceedings for the nullity of marriage are essentially a means of ascertaining the truth about the conjugal bond. Thus, their constitutive aim is . . . to render a service to the truth.”

After a year, my annulment was granted. While the process was drawn-out and arduous, the fact that it was done rigorously, thoroughly, reassures me that the tribunal performed its task in rendering “a service to the truth.” And the process required a lot of truth-telling: I held nothing back in the application, knowing the tribunal should have access not only to the actions of what happened, when and how, but my thoughts, motivations, fears, and expectations as well.

Once the application was filed, the rest was just waiting and praying. During that time, my husband and I attempted—at times imperfectly—to live in sexual continence. Paragraph 797 of the Catechism quotes St. Augustine: “What the soul is to the human body, the Holy Spirit is to the Body of Christ, which is the Church.” I believed the Holy Spirit would direct the tribunal to declare to me the truth of my conjugal bond and thus my ecclesial position. I had read online that there were lenient dioceses that allowed almost all annulments. I knew that my diocese was different, and I thanked God that he had spared me from “false mercy.”

The spirit of this age would have us believe that mercy always comes in the form of a simple granting of wishes. But true mercy is always an affirmation of truth. So many of us presume upon God’s grace, imagining that “grace” means a reversal of time, a rewriting of our choices. Yet Christ’s words remain: “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven” (Matt. 16:19). A marriage annulment, therefore, can never function as a “Catholic divorce,” but only as a careful discernment of the ecclesial truth of the marriage bond. When the process is approached in this spirit—seeking truth rather than exemption—it becomes a genuine act of mercy, one that allows the faithful to walk forward in clarity, fidelity, and peace.