Shattered Faith: A Woman's Struggle to Stop The Catholic Church from Annulling her Marriage. - book reviews

National Catholic Reporter, May 30, 1997 by Pamela Schaeffer

By Sheila Rauch Kennedy Pantheon, 238 pages, $23 hardcover

In her long and now public battle to preserve her failed marriage against annulment by the Catholic church, author Sheila Rauch Kennedy awaits one final response the Vatican's. She has appealed to Rome a decision by the Boston archdiocese co annul her marriage of 12 years to U.S. Rep. Joseph Kennedy II on the grounds that he lacked "due discretion" at the time of their marriage in 1979.

However the Vatican rules on the appeal, the power of Kennedy's public protest is already evident in two other responses it has provoked

First, her scathing assessment of the church's marriage annulment process in her book Shattered Faith: A Woman's Struggle to Stop the Catholic Church From Annulling Her Marriage (Pantheon 1997) has forced the Boston archdiocese into a posture church officials tend to abhor: that of public damage control.

The Pilot, Boston's archdiocesan newspaper, undertook a 10-part series in an effort to explain and Justify the highly formalized and legalized annulment process. As anyone who has discussed the practice knows, it is one of the church's most controversial practices, angering to many Catholics and puzzling to many Protestants.

Second, Kennedy's remarks about her first marriage that her former husband has a short temper and repeatedly told her she was "a nobody" after he entered politics in 1986. for example -- have eroded Joe Kennedy's ratings in polls and forced him to apologize publicly for "mistakes" in their relationship.

The congressman has his eye on the governor's mansion in Massachusetts and, as Eileen McNamara, Boston Globe columnist put it, "All the time Joe spent worrying about whether Bill would run would have been better spent worrying about what Sheila would write." The reference is to Bill McMillan, a potential political opponent and a,divorced Catholic who has said he would never seek to annul his marriage out of respect for his wife and children.

The Boston Globe reported on May 4, "Again and again, voters described the annulment issue as a character test that Kennedy flunked -- and as part of the standard practice for the men of the family when it comes to relationships with women."

Joe Kennedy, nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of Sen. Robert and Ethel Kennedy, requested the annulment of his first marriage in 1993, two years after the couple was divorced and as he was preparing to marry his assistant, Beth Kelly. He wanted the annulment, he said, so that he and his new wife could remain in good standing with the church. The process, which took from late 1993 to early 1996, far longer than most annulments, was slowed but not stopped by Sheila Kennedy's active and ongoing resistance, which she details in her book.

Sheila and Joe Kennedy had a nine-year relationship before they exchanged vows in a Catholic ceremony. They have two sons who, in their mother's mind, bear the emotional brunt of a nullification.

However personally satisfying her former husband's public apology might have been, Kennedy insists throughout her book that her goal was not revenge but truth. She strongly believes that the annulment process. far from being "healing" as some church officials have claimed, is based on hypocrisy and lies and is damaging to the people involved, to their children and to the church's image.

She and other women she interviewed feel strongly that to determine retroactively that Catholic marriages that have produced children and years of happiness were never "sacred" is, quite simply, a sham -- a way for the church to get around its ban on divorce and pave the way for people to marry again.

Many Catholics would no doubt applaud her opinion that it would be far more honest on the church's part to admit that a marriage failed because of mistakes people made and to allow them simply to divorce and start over -- as many other churches, including the Eastern Orthodox, do -- rather than to rely on church lawyers and judges to determine that a sacred bond never existed.

Tribunals "do not have the option," she wrote, to simply tell people, You had a sacramental marriage and "you blew it," but because you are sorry and recognize your mistakes, we'll allow you to try again.

"I saw annulment as the worst kind of lie, and I saw it as one from which, if I went along, I would never recover," she wrote. "Lying takes its toll not only on those the lie deceives but also on its perpetrator. The liar gives up a piece of himself, a piece of what it means to be human, a piece of his soul."

For Kennedy and other women she spoke with, divorce was a hard step, but annulment was far harder, for it distanced them from that which gave them hope and meaning both in marriage and divorce: their religious faith. For those who didn't want their marriages annulled, the church -- the institution that upholds the sacredness of the marital bond -- became the betrayer, the enemy, now declaring that their marriage was never valid. She quotes one cynical canon lawyer as saying there is no marriage that the church can't annul and another cleric as saying that many marriages, including long-term marriages in which no breakup has occurred, could be annulled if only one of the parties applied.