‘Til Decree Do Us Part

Certainly MacLeod’s experience suggests tribunals haven’t adopted a stricter interpretation of “defective consent.” At a loss to understand how her consent was defective, MacLeod demanded to see her ex-husband’s petition. She was insulted by his claim that neither she nor he was capable of forming the proper consent because both came from dysfunctional families. The petition even maligned the reputations of dead relatives, a particularly low blow to MacLeod, who insists she comes from “a very happy, loving family.” Even worse, she was being cast as someone who’d been “swinging from the trees” when she wed. “That really hurt. It’s demeaning for people to try to tell you that you didn’t know what you were doing when you got married.”

Simply tracking MacLeod’s case became a logistical challenge, as responsibility for it bounced between tribunals in Scotland, Ottawa, and Nova Scotia, where a patronizing bishop offered to “pray for me that my suffering did not turn into any kind of bitterness.” At no point was MacLeod told that she was entitled to an advocate. Only by sheer chance, about a year into the ordeal, did she retain one on the advice of a priest she met at St. Paul’s library, where she’d spent hours deciphering the jargon-laden nuances of canon law. The priest recommended a professor, a renowned authority on annulment, to represent her.

In a July 2002 letter to the presiding judicial vicar, the professor, who asked not to be named, laid out a raft of injustices and “serious violations” of canon law in MacLeod’s case. One month later, she received a curt note informing her that her ex-husband had abruptly withdrawn his petition. MacLeod believes it would have sailed through had she not finally retained the canon law expert, whose protests authorities couldn’t ignore. Alistair MacLeod, meanwhile, politely declined to discuss the case. “For me,” he said, “it’s water under the bridge.”

For his former wife, it has been harder to forgive and forget. Indeed, she’s found the annulment process “more upsetting” than the divorce itself, “because it’s taking away all the principles that you’re raised to believe in within the Catholic Church.”

MacLeod is not alone. I spoke with two other Canadian women, whom I’ll call Martha and Eleanor, who also told me the process shook the foundations of their faith. “I haven’t been back to church since, other than for the christening of my grandchildren and the weddings of my children, because everything I believed was just a joke,” said Eleanor, whose thirty-year marriage was annulled in 1997. Eleanor trusted the Church would protect the sanctity of her marriage, and did not realize she had the right to retain an advocate. She voiced her objections by phone to the judicial vicar who promised to meet with her, but never did. “I was very naive,” she said. “The annulment was granted so easy, so fast, based on just a couple of letters. I did not understand it.”

Martha met with outright hostility from Church officials when she objected to her ex-husband’s 2001 petition to annul their thirty-one-year marriage. She wasn’t allowed to see his petition and thus couldn’t refute whatever grounds he’d used to invalidate the union. The petition was eventually withdrawn, but only after Martha retained canon lawyer Philip Gray, who complained to the bishop in Martha’s diocese, and the Apostolic Signature, the Vatican’s top court, about the tribunal’s biased conduct. “If there was ever a case of adding insult to injury, this has got to be it,” Martha told me. “I cannot blame the entire Church for the faults of some misguided zealots. All the same though, I sure would like to see this hypocrisy and corruption publicly exposed.”

Despite such concerns, the Catholic Church seems determined to maintain a resolute silence. The Apostolic Nunciature (essentially the pontiff’s embassy in Canada), the head of the National Appeal Tribunal, the Conference of Bishops, and the Ottawa diocese all declined to comment, although the latter arranged for me to speak with Morrisey. “I drew the short straw,” the priest joked. Morrisey acknowledged that there may be some legitimacy to the criticisms levelled by “contentious respondents”—canon law parlance for those who object to annulment petitions. But for the most part, he dismissed such critics as unbalanced. “There are always going to be problems, because don’t forget that so many of the marriages that break up, break up on psychological grounds. And if somebody is disturbed or immature or things like that, we have to expect immature reactions on their part afterwards too.”

Certainly no one could pretend MacLeod is a dispassionate analyst of her own annulment. But her advocate made it clear her grievances weren’t simply the delusions of an embittered ex-wife. “I have no doubt,” he wrote the judicial vicar in 2002, “that the behaviour of the tribunals had certainly given Mrs. MacLeod sufficient basis for feeling that she was being unjustly treated, and that the procedures were being deliberately ‘manipulated’ in favour of the petitioner.”

Obviously, the Church does have some happy customers, namely the petitioners who win the right to remarry. Typical is the reaction of a prominent Ottawa businessman who was granted an annulment to one marriage and a dissolution of another—the former on the grounds that his wife misled him about her intention to raise their children as Catholics and the latter because his wife wasn’t baptized. Had he been unable to erase those first two mistakes, he told me, “it would have been a profound barrier” to the twenty years of bliss he found in his third marriage.

For progressive Catholics like Janice Leary, who founded the Massachusetts-based Save Our Sacrament to lobby for annulment reform, the solution is obvious. Abolish annulment, she says, and “declare that you’re in the modern age and divorce is a fact of life. Very simple.”