Pope fast-tracks annulment

VATICAN CITY – Pope Francis radically reformed the Catholic Church’s process for annulling marriages yesterday, allowing for fast-track decisions and removing automatic appeals in a bid to speed up and simplify the procedure.

Francis issued a new law regulating how bishops around the world determine when a fundamental flaw has made a marriage invalid. Catholics must get this church annulment if they want to remarry in the church.

But the process has long been criticized for being complicated, costly and out of reach for many Catholics, especially in poor countries where dioceses don’t have marriage tribunals.

In the document, Francis insisted that marriage remains an indissoluble union and that the new regulations aren’t meant to help to end them. Rather, he said, the reform is aimed at speeding up and simplifying the process so that the faithful can find justice.

The overall aim of the reform, he said, “is the salvation of souls.”

The biggest reform involves a new fast-track procedure, handled by a bishop, that can be used when both spouses request an annulment or don’t oppose it. It can also be used when other proof makes a more drawn out investigation unnecessary.

It calls for the process to be completed within 45 days.

Another reform is the removal of the automatic appeal after the first decision is made. Appeals are still possible, but they are no longer automatic – a simplification that has been used in the United States for many years.

The reform also allows the local bishop, in places where a three-judge tribunal isn’t available, to be the judge himself or to delegate the handling of the cases to a single priest-judge with two assistants.

That measure is aimed at providing Catholic couples with recourse to annulments in poorer parts of the world, or places where the Catholic Church doesn’t have the resources or manpower to have fully functioning tribunals.