Numbers Show Crisis In The Appreciation Of Christian Marriage
On Monday, 28 January, at the beginning of the audience for the Roman Rota, Mons. Raffaello Funghini, Dean of the Roman Rota, greeted the Holy Father in the name of the Rota and staff. Mons. Funghini commented on the increased number of marriage annulment cases submitted to the ecclesial tribunals and the reasons for the increase. Here is a translation of excerpts from his address in Italian.
Most Holy Father,
Because of a special, age-old privilege, the Roman Rota begins the Judicial Year with a solemn liturgical celebration in the Apostolic Palace, followed by a papal audience. This noble tradition has a deep, intrinsic meaning.
Judicial Authority Is Ecclesial Aimed At Procuring Heavenly And Eternal Goods
First of all, it circumscribes and qualifies the specific nature and function of our Tribunal, clearly expressing the marked difference and diversity between ecclesial and civil judicial power, although the administration of justice is a necessary function in both societies.
Apart form the need to apply the proper law with specific procedures in both these juridical orders, their fundamental difference is determined by their aim. Precisely because it is an expression of the Church as a supernatural society, the ecclesiastical judicial activity is included in the fullness of the life of the Church with her lofty goal, "coelestia ac sempiterna bona comparare", and constitutes an institution of the Church as a supernatural society.
Marriage Entails The Perfect Identity Of The Contract And Of The Sacrament Through The Will Of The Creator
It is common knowledge that today, by far, most of the activities of the Roman Rota concern causes of the nullity of marriage. In other words, they are cases in which the marriage of the baptized is not only a contract — pactum coniugale — but also, in a unique and inseparable reality, a sacrament, and "thus, through the will of the Creator, a res sacra" (Pius XII, Speech to the Roman Rota of 6 October 1946, AAS 38 [1946], p. 395). This is a reality where there is a perfect identity of the contract and a sacrament, and the sacrament must in no way be considered as something added to or accessory to the contract.
In Ten Years The Number Of Causes Has Doubled
It is precisely the fading of this truth, the disregard for and lack of recognition for the sacred nature of marriage, that has opened the door to the alarming crisis of the institution of marriage, and hence, of the family. This crisis is constantly before us, and daily we see it confirmed in the constant and noteworthy increase of the number of causes submitted to this Tribunal by the whole Catholic world. In the last decade in fact, they have almost doubled: on 31 December 1991, there were 591 cases pending, on 31 December 2001, there were 1,055.
In his discourse to the Rota of 25 October 1960, Blessed John XXIII already sounded an alarm: "In our time there is certainly something that unbeknown is spreading the dangers threatening the family institution and accentuating the perils that undermine it: and this is happening more and more insistently, enticingly, and deceitfully than in the past" (John XXIII, Address to the Roman Rota, 25 October 1960, AAS 552 [1960], p. 899).
If on the one hand, this notable increase in the causes of the nullity of marriage in ecclesiastical tribunals shows that the Christian values of many of the faithful are lived in a secularized, laicized context and manifest the grave crisis of the basic values themselves — civil marriages, separations, divorces and cohabitation or de facto unions are on the increase — on the other, should one wish to give the phenomenon a positive interpretation, despite the fear of the disaster of secularization, it reveals the eagerness of those who have recourse to the tribunals to relieve the torment of their inner anxiety born of the sentence of divorce and their deep conviction that only the Church's definitive judgement on their failed marriage, will succeed in restoring, together with full communion with the Church, their serenity and peace of mind.
Indissolubility Is Not Add-On Or A Tack-On
From our privileged observation point, apart from the light-hearted way in which marriage in facie Ecclesiae is experienced, along with the precariousness of economic and social conditions, we face a corrosion of values and moral barriers, such that it often reduces the actual celebration of marriage between the contracting parties to a mere legitimization and legalization before society of the union they desire to contract; whereas they consider the indissolubility of the marriage bond an ideal and desirable but not a binding realization, and they view true and valid marriage as nothing more than the realization of their community of life and love.
At the suggestion of the great and almost miraculous technological developments, and immersed in the subjectivity of modern thought, contemporary man has overestimated the accidental or secondary forms created by the influence of the culture. Leaving aside natural law and the ethics founded on natural and divine-positive law, men and women give marriage a fundamentally cultural dimension, not primarily and above all as a natural institution, but as a creation of culture and civilization.
Hence marriage has come to be conceived as a juridical institution that originates in human creativity, in culture, that has suggested and constantly suggests the form most suited to the sensitivity and mentality that have developed down through the ages.
Modern Culture Of Freedom Makes Couple Think They Can Do With Marriage Whatever They Want
No one can fail to see the aberration of this concept of marriage, the fruit of a false concept of freedom as the capacity and faculty of self-determination according to an autonomous choice of the goals and the proper means to realize them that disregards or openly rejects marriage as an institution whose central nucleus has its laws dictated and fixed by natural law which positive human law must serve in its respect for the fundamental natural law.
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