By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Pope Benedict XVI advised officials of the Roman Rota, the tribunal that deals mainly with marriage annulment cases, not to yield to a “false charity” that might justify annulling a marriage “at any cost.”
While speaking with the officials and lawyers of the Tribunal of the Roman Rota on Friday morning, the Pope said that true pastoral charity upholds justice and truth and should never lead the Church to grant an annulment to a Catholic whose marriage is valid according to church law.
“(I)t is important that effective efforts be made, whenever there seems to be hope of a successful outcome, to encourage the spouses to convalidate their marriage and restore conjugal cohabitation,” the Pope said.
“Your ministry is essentially a work of justice,” he told the Tribunal, saying that there is a widespread tendency to “contrast justice with charity, almost as if the one excluded the other. Some people maintain that pastoral charity justifies any measures taken towards the declaration of nullity of the marriage bond . . . “ even in cases where remarried couples seek an annulment for the sake of returning to the Sacraments.
The Holy Father warned them to avoid those “pseudo-pastoral demands . . . in which what counts is satisfying subjective requests in order to achieve a declaration of nullity at any cost, with the aim of overcoming, among other things, the obstacles to receiving the Sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist. … It would however be a false advantage”, he said, “to ease the way towards receiving the Sacraments, at the risk of causing people to live in objective contrast with the truth of their own individual state.”
He reminded them that in the eyes of the Catholic Church, a marriage celebrated with the full consent of the couple and following the correct form is always presumed to be valid, and a valid marriage is indissoluble.
To annul such a marriage “would be a fictitious good, and a serious lack of justice, to nevertheless smooth the way toward their reception of the sacraments,” the pope said
The church must act charitably toward the faithful, but always upholding justice and truth.
“Whoever loves others with charity is above all just to them. Not only is justice not foreign to charity, not only is it not an alternative or parallel way to charity: Justice is ‘inseparable from charity,’ intrinsic to it.
“Without truth, charity ends up in sentimentalism. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled arbitrarily. It is the fatal risk of love in a culture without truth. It falls prey to the emotions and contingent opinions of the individuals, an abused and distorted word, to the point of signifying the contrary.”
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