When Mercy Obscures Truth: Accompanying Catholics Through Divorce Without Falsifying the Bond

The United States holds 6 percent of the world's Catholics and produces 60 percent of its annulments. Success rates for American annulment petitions run between 90 and 97 percent. These are not statistics about a healthy sacramental culture; they are a clinical reading of what happens when pastoral compassion detaches from juridical truth.

On November 21, 2025, Pope Leo XIV addressed the Roman Rota — the Church's supreme marriage court — and named the pathology directly. Human judgment on the nullity of marriage, he said, cannot be 'manipulated by false mercy.' Compassion in annulment proceedings must never come 'at the expense of truth.' The sole question before a tribunal, he insisted, is whether a valid marriage existed at the moment of the wedding, regardless of whatever relational failure followed.

That speech is important. But it addresses tribunals. The harder and less-discussed pastoral problem sits one step downstream: what does a confessor, a spiritual director, or a parish minister do with the Catholic who cannot — or does not — receive a declaration of nullity, whose civil divorce is final, and who now wants to enter a second civil union?

The structure of the problem

Catholic marriage law starts from a presumption of validity. When two baptized persons exchange consent in the proper form, the Church presumes a sacramental bond exists until the contrary is proven. Canon law does not require that spouses be emotionally mature, psychologically healthy, or spiritually prepared. It requires that they be capable of the essential obligations of marriage and that their consent be free of grave defect. A marriage can be difficult, even catastrophic, without being null.

Fr. Andrew Larkin, a priest and canon lawyer who serves as defender of the marriage bond in Savannah, Georgia, identified what he calls a 'double-edged sword' in the current annulment culture: 'If we're saying all these marriages are invalid, what are we saying about marriage in general? That a valid marriage is hard to find?' His question is not rhetorical. If 90 to 97 percent of petitions succeed in American tribunals, either American Catholics have an extraordinary rate of defective consent, or something in the process is accommodating desired outcomes rather than establishing truth.

Only 35 percent of U.S. Catholics know that remarriage after divorce without an annulment is, according to Church teaching, adultery. That ignorance is itself a pastoral failure — not the ignorance of the pew, but the failure of those who form it. Larkin calls the broader disarray 'a crisis of faith,' not merely a procedural one.

What false mercy actually does

The Vitz-Nordling-Titus Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person locates the Fallen state of the human person in a disordering of intellect and will — concupiscence understood not merely as sexual appetite but as the tendency to substitute an apparent good for the real one. False mercy is a precise expression of this disorder: it offers comfort to the person in front of you by suppressing a truth that would require something costly of them.

In annulment proceedings, false mercy looks like a tribunal that grants nullity because the marriage was painful, because the petitioner is sympathetic, because denial would cause distress. Fr. Nathanael Block, judicial vicar of the Diocese of Gallup, names the interior standard that should govern every judge: 'I tell myself I'm going to be judged on this. Before I write a sentence, I seek direction: God, tell me how.' That is not scrupulosity. That is the recognition that juridical acts in the Church are acts of justice before God, not pastoral management of human unhappiness.[^1]

Pope Francis's Amoris Laetitia is sometimes read as licensing a softer approach to Catholics in irregular unions. Read carefully, it says something more demanding. It insists that before any important decision is made, 'each spouse has come to grips with his or her own history,' including 'recognizing a need for healing, insistent prayer for the grace to forgive and be forgiven, a willingness to accept help, and the determination not to give up but to keep trying.'[^2] The document does not authorize pastoral shortcutting. It demands the harder work of honest self-examination before any path forward is discerned.

Accompaniment that does not falsify

Here is the specific pastoral scenario that most demands clarity: a Catholic whose marriage was almost certainly valid — no grounds for nullity are present, or a tribunal has already denied the petition — who now wishes to enter a civil marriage with a new partner. What does genuine accompaniment look like?

The first thing it does not do is pretend the bond is absent because the divorce is final. Civil law can dissolve a civil contract. It cannot dissolve a sacramental bond. The pastoral minister who treats civil divorce as functionally equivalent to an annulment — who performs a blessing, welcomes the couple into full sacramental life, or simply declines to raise the question — is not being merciful. They are providing a false map.

What genuine accompaniment does require is the willingness to sit with the full complexity of the person's situation without resolving it falsely in either direction. The person is not beyond the reach of God's love. They are not excluded from the community. They may attend Mass. They may pray, serve, and participate in much of the Church's life. What they cannot do, while the first bond persists, is receive the Eucharist or marry in the Church — not because the Church wishes to punish them, but because those acts would themselves be false: they would signify a sacramental reality that does not exist.

Benedict Groeschel's mapping of spiritual growth in Spiritual Passages is useful here. The purgative way is not primarily about comfort; it is about the progressive ordering of desire toward truth. A person who genuinely cannot obtain an annulment and chooses, with full knowledge of what it means, to enter a civil union anyway is making a serious moral choice. Accompaniment does not mean making that choice invisible. It means remaining present to the person as they live with its consequences — without endorsing what cannot be endorsed.

The Ignatian tradition's Rules for Discernment of Spirits identify a key dynamic: the enemy of growth often presents as consolation. The false mercy that grants an invalid annulment, or that tells someone their second civil marriage is 'effectively recognized' by God even without one, consoles in the moment and devastates over time. It removes the person from honest encounter with their own conscience.

The specific cost of the numbers

From 1968 to 1994, nullity decrees in the United States rose from fewer than 400 to nearly 60,000 per year. Notre Dame professor Robert Vasoli, in What God Has Joined Together, documented this as a crisis of American Catholic juridical culture, not a sign of sacramental health. By 2014, the number had declined to approximately 23,000 per year — still historically anomalous. After Pope Francis's 2015 reforms made the process faster and cheaper and removed the safeguard of automatic appeals, American filings began trending upward again.

John Clark, whose book Betrayed Without A Kiss examines the attack on matrimony from within the Church, reads Leo's Rota address as 'a big shift': 'He's identifying a problem, and it's happening very early in his papacy. He's saying we've been doing this wrong for a while now, without saying those words.' Leo is a canon lawyer. He is also the first American pope, which may matter when the pathology is largely concentrated in American tribunals.[^3]

The macro-level numbers matter pastorally because they shape the expectations that divorced Catholics bring to the process. When the effective success rate of an annulment petition is 90 to 97 percent, the annulment process begins to function — culturally, psychologically — as Catholic divorce. People file expecting to receive what they need in order to remarry. Tribunals that grant 9 out of 10 petitions have, functionally, established that expectation as reasonable. The person who is then denied, or who never files because they already know their marriage was valid, is left without good pastoral models for what to do next.

What the Church actually teaches about the path forward

The Church does not leave validly married divorced Catholics without a path. What it offers is not easy, but it is coherent. Separation is sometimes necessary — Amoris Laetitia is explicit that when abuse, violence, or serious harm is present, separation 'becomes morally necessary.'[^2] Civil divorce may be appropriate to protect legal rights. What the Church holds firm on is that these measures do not dissolve the bond.

For the Catholic who cannot remarry sacramentally, the Church proposes something countercultural: the possibility of living in fidelity to a bond that the culture has declared dead. This is not a punishment; it is an invitation into a form of witness that Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians names as genuine charism. Groeschel, working in the tradition of John of the Cross, would call this a passive purification — a suffering that, when received with faith, becomes formative rather than merely painful.

None of this is easy to say to someone sitting in a parish office. But easy and truthful are not the same thing. The minister who says the hard thing — 'I cannot tell you your bond is gone, but I can walk with you through what faithfulness to it looks like now' — is doing something more genuinely loving than the one who solves the problem by pretending it away.

The formation debt

Larkin's observation that only 35 percent of U.S. Catholics know that post-divorce remarriage without an annulment is a sin is a formation problem, not a mercy problem. People cannot be held responsible for acting against a teaching they were never taught. But the solution to that ignorance is not to make the teaching disappear; it is to teach it — clearly, compassionately, and early, before the crisis arrives.

Haslam, writing on leadership and the family, places this in a broader frame: 'Strong preparation by the couple in advance of marriage is critical. Marriage is a mission and a commitment for life which will require much sacrifice and willingness to grow together over a lifetime.'[^1] The annulment crisis is in part a pre-marital formation crisis. Couples who understand what they are entering — a sacramental bond that participates in Christ's irrevocable covenant with the Church — approach it differently than those who understand it as a religious version of a civil contract.

Pope Leo XIV's Rota address does not solve this. But it names the specific distortion — false mercy — that must be corrected before the pastoral work can begin honestly. The person in an irregular union deserves the truth about their situation, the full warmth of pastoral presence, and the refusal to pretend that love and truth are enemies. Those three things together are what Catholic accompaniment actually means.

References

[^1]: Haslam, The Source and Summit of Leadership — 'Strong preparation by the couple in advance of marriage is critical. Marriage is a mission and a commitment for life.' [^2]: Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia, §181 — on self-examination, healing, and the conditions for discernment after marital breakdown; §241 on separation as a last resort. [^3]: Rev. Charles Sikorsky, lecture transcript — historical overview of U.S. annulment statistics, from 338 cases in 1968 to a peak of 41,121, with the United States accounting for the majority of worldwide nullity declarations despite representing a small share of the global Catholic population.