Where marriages are examined

IN the frescoed "Room of a Hundred Ays" under the fifteenth century cloisters of a renaissance Roman palace, 22 ecclesiastical judges make or break 200 Catholic marriages a year. The cases of 700 couples will be archived as unjustified every year, and in about 35 per cent of those which do reach the debating stage, annulments will be denied.
Helping the judges of the Rota Romana in their lofty setting no longer the "Sacred" Rota are modern computers, and they have recently filed such real life dramas as the bigamist who kept his first marriage a secret from both his second wife and the priest who married them, the businessman too engrossed in his career, and the man who lied to his wife that he was a doctor. All three marriages are now null and void.
According to the Rota Romana's latest statistics, dioceses throughout the world last year listened to more than 70,000 tales of marital woes. Ninety per cent of annulment requests came from the United States where the Vatican has heard with alarm that "marriages are dissolved almost by phone".
Pope John Paul II has ordered judges, particularly on regional tribunals, to be more severe. At the opening of the Vatican's judicial year he told them: "I feel I must remind you that you are not only empowered, but obliged to fulfill your duty earnestly".
Revisions in 1982 of the Code of Canon Law on marriage modernised the Rota's procedures, if not their outcome. In line with continually evolving medical science, especially psychiatry, insanity as a motive for marriage dissolution will now be accepted with an exact pathological description of the condition.
The Rota makes room for the possibility that a husband or wife may be pyschologically incapable of sustaining or fulfilling marital obligations. But statistics show that most would-be "incapable" spouses are not sufficiently so to pass the gruelling examination of up to three Rota pyschiatrists.
Today 90 per cent of the Rota's work concerns marriages, but it also has the power to judge so-called contentious cases where the activities of bishops or personal papal prelatures are called into question. Judges are chosen from among the world's experts on canon and civil law. Since the 1982 reforms they need not be ecclesiastics but are nominated by the Pope mainly on the basis of their international legal reputation. The Pope never intervenes, however, in their decisions. Judges are flanked by three defenders and prosecutors called "promoters of justice".
Their palace outside Vatican City walls but considered in diplomatic terms Holy See territory also houses the prestigious finishing school for future Rota judges, lawyers, defenders and prosecutors. The school currently has 75 students, including 15 women, from all over the world. Their final exam the filing of a case sentence in Latin will last an entire day with the Rota judges they will one day replace, adjudicating.
Before a husband or wife can plead before the Rota Romana their marriage will have been examined first by one regional tribunal then another, to see if the sentences are the same. If not, the file passes to Rome. At a symposium at Rome's Gregorian University last January legal experts heard that annulments came easier in the United States and were widely referred to as "Catholic divorces". In some American States, cases were debated by phone. European regional diocesan judges were more painstaking while Americans more "understanding", symposium delegates heard. Psychological disturbances causing marriage breakdowns were required to be more "disturbing" *in Europe than in the States.
The well publicised and worn out patience of one European VIP plaintiff to the Rota Romana would seem to confirm the transatlantic differences.
Princess Caroline of Monaco, now 31, remarried, and the mother of three children, has been waiting since 1980 for a Vatican annulment of her first two year marriage to French businessman Philippe Junot. According to Rota sources the elder daughter of Prince Rainier and the late Princess Grace has "gone down the list" of main accepted motives for an annulment. She has told judges her first husband was unfaithful, and married her without the intention of having children. When Junot denied the allegations Caroline last year tried another avenue. She accused herself of immaturity. As the case stands Caroline may not receive the sacraments and she cannot fulfill her wish to marry her second husband Stefano Casiraghi, in church.