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Open Concubinage. Where secular divorce is permitted, the easiest solution for many disgruntled Catholics is simply civil divorce. But in Italy, Spain and ten other Catholic countries, church influence on the state has made annulment the only way out of a marriage, and hardship stories are commonplace. For some, despite the fact that the church will often waive actual trial costs, the process remains too expensive because they must still pay for such important incidentals as medical examinations. One hapless Italian has been legally married to a hermaphrodite since 1936 because he cannot pay the fees —roughly $1,500—for the required medical examinations. Even with money, the process is by no means easy. Only an average 325 annulments are granted annually by Italian tribunals. Film Director Michelangelo Antonioni waited eight years for a decree. Producer Carlo Ponti gave up and became a French citizen to marry Sophia Loren.
For many Italians, inured to such delays, the answer lies in open concubinage. Italian Author Gabriella Barca, in her book / Separati (The Separated Ones), estimates that at least 800,000 Italians live quite publicly with second "wives" and families. The church, however, is adamantly opposed to a pending Italian divorce bill and even briefly took to Vatican Radio to beam its protest to the Italian people. Yet the Vatican's own reforms—even such enlightened measures as the new American regulations—will be crippled by a woeful lack of skilled manpower. One fairly optimistic Vatican canon lawyer estimates that only 18 of the 160 U.S. dioceses have an adequate tribunal staff.
Total Overhaul. Many critics think that the present system of ecclesiastical marriage tribunals should not so much be revised as abolished—and that all canon law on marriage needs total overhaul. Authors West and Francis argue that a person's confessor ought to have primary discretion in determining a moral right to remarry in "obvious cases" of marital tragedy. In doubtful cases a pastoral group of clergy and married persons, competent in medicine, law and domestic relations, might be consulted. Similar parish teams have been suggested in Germany to investigate and possibly approve remarriage in the church itself. In the meantime, couples who have been divorced but successfully remarried, the critics generally agree, should be welcomed to the sacraments of the church. A person should no more be excommunicated for an irregular marriage, they argue, than for other aberrations from Christian ideals.
Such changes, the reformers contend, are consistent with early Christian practice, which tolerated irregularities in the community on the presumption that Christians were working toward perfection but had not achieved it. Moreover, the traditional definition of what kind of marriage is "sacramental," and thus indissoluble, is also being questioned. Recent Catholic theology has begun to suggest that sacramental marriage is not something achieved judicially, by a marriage ceremony and physical consummation, but grown into through a long process of living, and lov-'ng, together.