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Pope Paul VI is openly alarmed at the thousands of annulment petitions submitted in recent years to the Sacred Rota in Rome, the church's final court of appeals on marital matters. Annulment can be a temptingly clear-cut solution to complex legal and human dilemmas, although sometimes it seems to non-Catholics like a merry-go-round that permits influential Catholics such as Lee Radziwill and Moviemaker Michelangelo Antonioni to shed old spouses and acquire new ones with the approval of the church. Currently, Italian Actor Vittorio Gassman, twice mar ried (to Actresses Nora Ricci and Shelley Winters) and twice civilly divorced, is asking the Rota to annul his church marriage to Ricci on grounds that she did not accept the indissolubility of marriage at the time she contracted it, which would make it invalid in the eyes of the church. The annulment, if granted, would permit Gassman to wed French Actress Juliette Mayniel, who gave birth to their son Alessandro last month.
Recognizing the spiritual anguish caused when people can neither live together in conjugal love nor get a divorce, some priests have been known to advise young couples, pressured to marry because the girl is pregnant, to contract a civil wedding. Later on, if they see that their life together is working out, they can get married in church.
"Subtle Casuistry."The church's willingness to grant annulments while refusing to permit divorce troubles many Catholics. At the Vatican Council's concluding session, Melchite Archbishop Elias Zoghbi denounced the "subtle casuistry" of the church: "It happens that after ten or 20 years of marriage, they suddenly discover an impediment that permits everything to be resolved as though by magic. Our faithful are sometimes stupefied and scandalized by it all." He suggested that the Catholic Church allow divorce on certain grounds, such as abandonment, as the Orthodox churches do.
Switzerland's Charles Cardinal Journet, presumably on Pope Paul's orders, hastened to spike further debate by reasserting the church's traditional teaching. But Zoghbi's jarring plea, says Dominican Theologian Eduard Schillebeeckx, "placed the problem on the table, and that in itself is most important."
The Vatican Council has already tempered the harsh Augustinian notion that the sole purpose of marriage is procreation; the new concept is that marriage is first and foremost a "union of love."
This may gradually change the church's view on what constitutes a valid marriage. If the chief end of marriage is conjugal love, says one theologian, its absence could flaw the marriage contract to the point that the union itself becomes invalid.