Tribunal Director Criticizes Us
- Posted by Mary's Advocates
- On October 7, 2024
- 1 Comments
Update: This blog was published at 12:46 pm Eastern time, and seven hour later, at 7:27 p.m., our $9.00 subscription was refunded and my comment on the substack was deleted.
A woman with her licentiate in canon law, E. Magdalen Ross, published a substack article where she criticizes our website without identifying us. Her background is published on “The Anchor,” which is the newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River. She was made the Director of Canonical Services last year.
In her article “Separation of the Spouses: a Canon Lawyer’s Opinion” Magdalen says, “People who have no formal training in canon law and who then have not applied that knowledge and gained further training and expertise by serving in the Catholic Church’s courts (tribunals) are really out of their depths on this.” […] “There is at least one website that keeps promoting this idea, that a bishop’s permission is necessary to file for divorce.”
Comments on her article’s webpage are only allowed by those who pay the subscription fee, so I paid $9.00 and posted this comment.
The reason to “hound” a respondent spouse is to implement the Church’s exclusive jurisdiction over marriage cases: both cases of separation and cases of invalidity. Abandonment for no just cause is a matter that the authority of the Church can/should judge. The civil forum has no competence to relieve a spouse of the natural obligations of marriage (which are supernaturalized for married Catholics). The civil forum degrades all obligations of marriage with no-fault divorce.
The Roman Rota has used the canons on separation of spouses to result in judgements that the respondent is a malicious abandoner. Malicious desertion is a ground for temporary separation (S.R. Rotae Dec., XXI (1929), Decisio LXIII, par. no. 4). [D]esertion has been adjudged by the S.R. Rota as a cause sufficiently grave to authorize separation for an indefinite period of time (S.R. Rotae Dec., XXI (1929), Decisio LXIII, par. no. 4). [T]he Sacred Roman Rota has recognized among others the following as justifying causes for a temporary separation […] malicious desertion, done without justification but at the same time with the intention of not returning (S.R. Rotae Dec., V (1913), Decisio, XIX, nn. 17-18).
Canon law professor González teaches the same in her JDC dissertation. Judicial stipulation of malicious abandonment in the canonical jurisprudence is a unanimous consideration of autonomous causes for conjugal separation. (now-canon law professor, Ana Fernandez-Coronado González, El Abandono Malicioso Estudio Jurispurdencial, English Malicious Abandonment, Study of Jurisprudence. 1985)
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