Decades ago, I was called to assist the marriage tribunal of my diocese as a judge, under provisions the Holy See had extended to dioceses that lacked a sufficient number of trained canon lawyers to staff their tribunals. Because I held a pontifical degree in theology — the Licentiate in Sacred Theology I earned at Louvain — I was conscripted into that service. It was not a role I had sought, but it became one I came to value deeply. I have always had a particular interest in canon law, and in marriage law especially, as it pertains to the process of annulment: a sad but necessary means by which the church seeks to bring healing to couples who have suffered the collapse of a marriage — an all too common reality in our society today.
With the growth over time in the number of trained canon lawyers available to the diocese, I was eventually relieved of that tribunal responsibility. But I have carried the wisdom gained from those years with me throughout my more than fifty-two years in the priesthood. It is a peculiar grace of ecclesial service that one’s formal duties may end while the insight they impart does not.
It was with that background, then, that I read with real interest the two-part column Cardinal Blase Cupich recently completed on the marriage nullity process — coming, fittingly, in the year that marked the tenth anniversary this past April of Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, the document that gathered the fruits of the 2014–2015 Synods on the Family and gave the church’s pastoral approach to marriage and family life its most developed expression in a generation.
What Cardinal Cupich Recovers
In his first column, Cardinal Cupich set the historical scene: the 1983 Code’s requirement of a “double conforming sentence,” under which two separate tribunal judgments — often years apart — had to agree before a party was free to marry again in the church. Those of us who served on tribunals in that era know firsthand how this structure, however well-intentioned in its caution, could compound rather than relieve the suffering of the faithful. A process meant to protect the sanctity of marriage too often became, in practice, an ordeal layered atop an already painful wound.
Pope Francis’s 2015 reforms — Mitis Iudex Dominus Iesus chief among them — did not touch the church’s dogmatic commitment to the indissolubility of marriage. What they touched was procedure: the elimination of mandatory appeal, the restoration of the diocesan bishop as judge in his own right rather than merely a delegator of judicial authority, simplified rules of venue, and a renewed insistence that tribunal fees never become a barrier to justice for the poor. These were not concessions to a therapeutic culture, as some critics have suggested. They were, rather, a return to something more ancient: the bishop as pater familias of his local church, personally attentive to the wounds of his own flock.
The Processus Brevior Itself
Cardinal Cupich’s second column turns to the mechanism that has drawn the most attention and, frankly, the most misunderstanding: the processus brevior, or shorter process, governed by Canon 1683. Two conditions must hold together — mutual consent of the parties, and grounds so manifest that an extended investigation would serve no purpose. When both are present, the judicial vicar appoints an instructor and an assessor, the bishop himself reviews the evidence in consultation with the defender of the bond, and if he arrives at moral certainty, he issues a definitive sentence (decree of nullity) himself.
I want to underscore what the cardinal rightly emphasizes: a decree of nullity is not a Catholic divorce. It is a juridical finding that a valid, sacramental bond never came into being in the first place — because of simulated consent, grave fear, psychological incapacity, fraud, or one of the other recognized defects Pope Francis specifically named as apt for this expedited track: marriages that collapse within weeks, an abortion procured at or near the time of the wedding, an affair that spans the ceremony itself. These are not new categories invented to make annulment easier to obtain. They are ancient juridical realities — defect of consent, incapacity, deceit — that the church has always recognized as vitiating the marital bond. What changed in 2015 was not the theology of marriage but the speed and humanity with which that theology could be applied to real, suffering people.
A Tribunal Judge’s Reflection
Having sat, however modestly, in the judge’s chair myself, I can testify that nothing in this reform diminishes the gravity of the tribunal’s task. If anything, placing the judgment more directly in the hands of the diocesan bishop raises the stakes of pastoral responsibility rather than lowering them. What the reform recognizes — and what Cardinal Cupich’s two columns capture so well — is that canonical rigor and pastoral tenderness were never meant to be opposed. They are, rather, two expressions of the same commitment: to speak truthfully about what a marriage was or was not, and to do so with the speed and compassion that wounded souls have every right to expect from their church.
In this year that marks ten years of Amoris Laetitia, Cardinal Cupich’s timely reflection reminds us that the exhortation’s call to accompaniment and discernment was never merely pastoral sentiment. It found — and continues to find — concrete institutional expression in reforms like this one: canon law placed, as it should always be, in the service of the salvation of souls.
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