A famous Sunday morning talk show co-host  often asserts that religious belief is purely private: nobody's  business but the individual believer's--ever! Under any circumstances! But  reality has a way of proving him wrong. For religious beliefs are formed and shared within groups and passed on down the centuries. Religious beliefs have, therefore,  practical, social consequences.

One such belief among most Christians is that marriage between believing Christians is more than just a civil compact. To Roman Catholics, Orthodox and to many others, marriage is a sacrament, a channel of God's special grace to men and women on their pilgrimage through mortal life to eternal life. Christians believe that there are Divine rules about Christian marriage.  One such rule is that, once freely and knowingly entered into via a public and properly witnessed ceremony, Christian marriage cannot be dissolved by any agency other than death. Since the Reformation of the 16th Century,  however, newer Christian groups have eliminated marriage from among the seven sacraments. Some groups have also argued that marriage is altogether too earthy for God ever to have intended it as a special channel of grace to help link lovers, parents, children and families to their Creator. After all, some say , marriage is mainly about species propagation, child raising, role playing, power relationships, property rights, inheritances and the like and is,  therefore, inherently unlikely to endure--especially as populations in America and elsewhere age.

In the United States a civil marriage contract freely entered into which commits an adult couple to sexual fidelity until death has become the easiest legally binding promise ever made from which to exit without penalties. And even the Roman Catholic Church in the United States has created an annulment process at diocesan levels which Church officials in Rome and elsewhere have argued at times sounds  more like Sigmund Freud than Jesus Christ.

In England some months ago the Queen virtually commanded her son and daughter-in-law to divorce. One thinks back to Henry VIII who married Catherine of Aragon in 1509 and then in 1527 sought to have his marriage annulled. Catherine refused to cooperate, appealed to Rome and in 1534 the Pope said that Catherine was right. She and Henry Tudor were linked for life. Henry then  broke the links of fealty  to Rome and the national Church of England was born.

Not many days ago U.S. Representative Joseph Kennedy of Massachusetts went before a press conference to announce that he would not be a candidate for governor of that State in 1998. For his prominent Roman Catholic political family was being blamed for producing  "poster boys of bad behavior" and he himself had been roasted for seeking and having received from  the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. a judgment of annulment of his 1979 marriage to Sheila Rauch Kennedy.

Many a lay Christian's introduction to the Roman Catholic practice of annulment (declaring that a marriage was never valid from the beginning) has come through Sheila Rauch Kennedy's book, SHATTERED FAITH, New York, Pantheon Books, 1997,  list price $23.  Mrs. Kennedy, an Episcopalian, had taken the initiative in seeking civil divorce from her husband. But she has objected to the archdiocese of Boston's ruling  that she was never sacramentally married in the first place. She argued, 

"My husband and I had known each other for nine years before we married in a Catholic ceremony. We had been married for twelve years before we divorced, and we had two wonderful children...It seemed that if I were to agree to an annulment, I would be lying before God."

Sheila Rauch Kennedy's book is not pleasant reading. For she writes of a failed marriage and, like abortion, that is not something which a rational person celebrates. Still, the author reminds us that, like foreign policy,  marriage is intrinsically a high risk activity. Mrs Kennedy wonders why her husband's church, which does not recognize divorce, nonetheless offers much support to divorced Catholics and little to "annulled" Catholics and especially to women who resist their annulments. 

Such an existential, intimate and personal  study of marriage tribunals by one with a personal stake in their activities is not the stuff of dispassionate doctoral dissertations. But personal pain and honesty do grab one's attention. And it may not be a bad thing to bring canon law down out of the clouds. Moreover, there is something  of the young St. Augustine in the method behind Sheila Rauch Kennedy's book. Augustine was struck by problem after problem, Manicheism, the nature of evil, religious toleration, etc. and bravely tackled those problems despite deficiencies in his formal education. Similarly, Mrs. Kennedy in her pain creates a viable method to get started tackling the question: who says I was never married in the first place? 

"Almost immediately, I began searching for information to help me understand the annulment process and make some sense of the anguish I was felling. I read books on church law...I met with historians, priests, professors, and lawyers who were familiar with church courts."

Mrs Kennedy also used  her own experiences and her own intellect to illuminate this complex meeting place of religion, power, public life and justice.  She wonders at the staff of marriage tribunals (30 or more persons in Boston) applying a barely understood, theoretically dubious depth psychology theory of human freedom to very human situations, resulting in over 60,000 annulments a year in the USA: a huge percentage of all which take place throughout the Catholic world.

Finally, Mrs Kennedy positively resurrects Catherine of Aragon. She portrays this proud Queen, wife and mother, beloved of the London crowds, as ferociously brave in defending her marriage bond and resisting her husband's declared intention to declare their daughter, the future Queen Mary, illegitimate. Like Catherine of Aragon, Sheila Rauch Kennedy has appealed to Rome. She says that she has confidence in Pope John Paul II and his conservative curia to confirm that she and Joseph Kennedy knew what they were doing in 1979 when they married and that there were no physical, medical, moral or psychological circumstances making that marriage a nullity.

SHATTERED FAITH is not a scholarly book. But it a book worth reading. It is passionate. Its author seeks to understand Christian marriage and one Church's mechanism for dealing with civil marriages which may from their very start lack a sacramental dimension. The author has provided a helpful introductory bibliography to an arcane subject: a subject anything but trivial.
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for Asheville TRIBUNE