No-fault divorce, easy annulments, and abandoned spouses.

Fascinating interview at GodSpy with Bai Macfarlane, a homeschooling, at-home mother of four — well, at least she was before her husband won custody of the kids and put them in school and day care — who has been campaigning for an end to no-fault divorce and advocating for greater care in the granting of tribunal declarations of nullity.  Her proposal that the civil courts defer to the Catholic tribunal in the case of legal marriages between Catholics doesn’t sound tenable to me.  But she has a lot of very thoughtful things to say from the point of view of a woman who doesn’t want the courts to end her legal marriage, nor the tribunal to declare her union invalid.

Are such declarations granted too easily?  Possibly so, in some individual cases.  I tend to think that the large number of such declarations granted in the U. S. dioceses are a reasonable response to an untenable situation, namely poor marriage preparation and poor discrimination on the part of the clergy who preside at the weddings.  I’d bet that at least half of all apparent marriages between Catholics are arguably vulnerable to being declared invalid, if the facts were known.