When Pope Francis earlier this month announced new, simplified rules for Catholic marriage annulments, I had recently received an email from a marriage tribunal in Belgium. My first payment of 250 euros had been received, the note said, telling me to await next steps in the annulment of my marriage.
Annulments have for centuries been the Catholic way of addressing the failure of a marriage, and are most famous for when Henry VIII started his own church because he couldn’t get one. The process is onerous to “affirm the indissolubility of marriage,” Bill Collinge, author of “The Historical Dictionary of Catholicism,” told me. “That divorce is not OK is one of the few things we all agree Jesus was explicit about.” But annulments also affirm that some marriages weren’t properly founded, for reasons that can include psychological immaturity.
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