Q. You worked many years with the Diocesan Tribunal that handles examining whether marriages in the Catholic Church were valid or not. You also worked many years on the Roman Rota, the high court of the Church. With that experience in mind, what are your thoughts on the recent discussions within the context of the Synod on whether the process of annulments or marriage validation can be streamlined?

A. There are a lot of things that could be done to make the process of examining the validity of marriages simpler. One of them would be efficiency of training enough people to do it expeditiously.

I would have to do a survey to find out but I would suspect that in many places we do not have adequate personnel to deal with the number of petitions for declarations of invalidity and validity that come in. That is one of the problems.

The process of annulments is cumbersome and lengthy because in the practice of law in the human world there are two big systems by which the legal cases are presented and resolved.

One method is the civil method in which people go to open court to orally present their case aided by such documents and so on, as are necessary for their arguments.  There is a hearing, a trial, by which the judge hears both sides of the issue and then it is committed for a decision. In the civil law they do that with juries.

In the ecclesiastical system we do not have juries or trials. The process is all done through interviews and writing which takes a long time. When you talk about annulments you are talking about establishing whether or not the essential conditions of the married state were fulfilled. That is the issue.

They are fulfilled when both parties have an act of the will sufficient for the purpose.

All the responses from those involved are put in writing and that takes a long time. Then it has to be put together in such ways that the judges, sometimes there is one judge and sometimes there is more than one, have to be able to have access to it and read it and make their judgment based upon what they have read. That too is a lengthy process.

I don’t know that going to an open court system would help us. When you are dealing with ordinary civil law, crimes and so on, it is possible because you can objectify those. But when we are talking about the nullity of marriage you are talking about people’s personal decisions in marriage and whether or not they allow that to be analyzed and discussed publicly, I don’t know if that would be such a good thing.

Send your topics or questions for Bishop Doran’s Teaching Moment to observer@rockforddiocese.org