Campaign – Help Roman Rota Marriage Defense

Feb. 19, 2026
Mary’s Advocates is raising $5,000 to hire a canon lawyer for a husband whose annulment case is on appeal in Rome. We will call him Tim.

A midwestern Archdiocese decided his marriage was invalid because he and his wife supposedly suffered from a “grave lack of discretion of judgment” (cf. Fr. David Nix c. 1095, 2°).  He appealed to the Roman Rota and his case is now in front of Msgr. David Jaeger, O.F.M. Jaeger has already issued some decrees by which Tim is dumbfounded.

Only a Rota-certified canon lawyer is allowed to represent a party at the Roman Rota, and we are trying to raise money so Tim can hire one who is interested in upholding marriage against the misapplication of the psychological grounds for invalidity. If an appellant doesn’t hire his own Rota lawyer, he may be left with none, or he’ll be assigned a lawyer for free. One of the Rota lawyers told me that 90% of marriages are invalid because people are too immature, and I want Tim to avoid getting a free lawyer who believes that.

Tim’s Story below
Who is Rota Judge Jaeger

To display your name or comment, first choose your donation amount. Before clicking “Next →,” select “Write us a comment” and “Display your donation & comment on the donor wall.” (See the 90-second video for help)

If we reach the $5,000 goal, we will continue to process donations, allowing us to raise even more to hire Rome canon lawyers.

Continued from above.

Tim’s Story

Tim and his wife have been serious Catholics their whole lives and are from intact Catholic families with faith as an integral part of their upbringing. When they were in college, Tim met his now-wife and they were active in the Newman center. They got engaged after his wife finished college and were married six months later. They eventually had six children. Tim has had stable jobs, and his wife was a stay-at-home mom.

Seven years ago, Tim’s wife filed for divorce, but she presents herself as a ‘super Catholic.’ With no-fault divorce, there was nothing Tim could do to stop the civil divorce. When Tim was in confession, he alluded to his situation as a divorce defendant, and he remembers the priest said there is an epidemic of women filing for no-fault divorce. These women find justification for divorce on the internet by discovering their husbands are emotionally abusive narcissists. Tim says he even asked his wife to help him in counseling so he could identify and adjust his so-called narcissistic behavior. However, she refused.

In early 2022, the Archdiocese tribunal mailed Tim a letter saying his wife claims their marriage was invalid. Tim says her petition alluded only to vague notions like her being naïve and feeling they were not really in love with each other on their wedding day. Tim’s wife didn’t draft the language on her petition. It was drafted by a “field advocate.” I found the Archdiocese published a list of over 80 “field advocates.” Each “helps in the preparation of the formal petition.”

Tim told the tribunal how his wife, her family, and their friends were happy about the engagement and wedding. He tells me his witnesses say the same. He remembers reading nothing in tribunal testimony claiming that he or his bride suffered from a severe psychopathology making them incapable of choosing to marry for normal reasons (cf. Saint Pope JPII 1988 Address to the Roman Rota). Tim understands that “grave lack of discretion of judgement” applies to someone who got married for abnormal or demented reasons, as if the person was compelled to marry for some bizarre reason and couldn’t exercise his or her will to freely choose whether to marry or not marry.

Nonetheless, the Archdiocese decided his marriage was invalid because both Tim and his bride “suffered a grave lack of discretion” (canon 1095,2°). Tim says most of the Archdiocese’s so-called proofs were his wife’s claim that her father was mean to her mother, and the tribunal’s description of Tim and his wife’s conflicts many years into their marriage. Tim says the whole ordeal feels like a Soviet show trial.

In June of 2023, Tim presented his own reasons for appeal to the Roman Rota. One time, Tim had to report the Archdiocese to the Supreme Tribunal of the Signatura because the Archdiocese refused to even give Tim his own copy of the decree issued by Jaeger’s Rota Tribunal. Tim finally obtained a copy of Jaeger’s decree. For various reasons, Tim raised complaints at a tribunal above the Rota and he learned last week that the case is still open at the Rota.

Jaeger’s tribunal found Tim’s appeal to be “merely dilatory’” (in other words, submitted solely for the purpose of delaying his wife from getting her annulment). Tim finds Jaeger saying that blatant factual errors do not matter; what matters to Jaeger is how Tim’s wife describes her interior perceptions at the time of the wedding.

Tim wonders if he ever should have participated in the tribunal proceedings in the first place because it is a waste of time since the outcome seems preconceived. Additionally, everyone who knows them is being given scandal. People are shocked that the Church is telling his wife that she was never really married. Apparently, any woman—twenty years after her marriage—can fabricate an implausible story about her interior perceptions. Even if she was happy to be engaged, happy to get married, and was choosing marriage for normal reasons, she can make up a story twenty years later.

Because he married a serious Catholic, Tim thought his wife would be committed to working on their marriage. He expected her to be willing to speak with the priest who made a home-visit with the intention of encouraging Tim’s wife to work on resolving her difficulties with their marriage. Tim says she refused but instead filed for civil no-fault divorce and petitioned the Church for an annulment.

We hope that by hiring a specialist Rota canon lawyer to uphold his marriage, we increase the chances of defending marriage for everyone.

Msgr. David Jaeger, Rota Judge

Friends of Mary’s Advocates have reason to be interested in Rota Judge Msgr. David Jaeger. In my 19 January 2026 blog, I showed how he endorses the Canon Law Society of America’s (CLSA) handbook for marriage nullity cases, which recommends practices arguably contrary to law. The CLSA was listed as a dissenting organization in the 1997 book, Call to Action or Call to Apostasy?: How Dissenters Plan to Remake the Catholic Church in Their Own Image.

In 2020, a Cleveland Diocese canonist quoted a decree issued by Msgr. Jaeger in a paper the canonist presented to the Canon Law Society of America. He and Jaeger say, essentially, every spouse who wants to be separated has the right to do so; if a canon law case were to tell him/her otherwise, the Church would be making the spouse a slave (Gardiner. p. 21). Jaeger says the canon law forum will not judge whether anyone is at fault when a spouse separates. I’ve learned privately that Jaeger supports this position by his belief that the current Church teaching of Vatican II Gaudium et spes n. 48 would forbid the Church to find someone wrongfully separated from the other spouse. So, I guess Jaeger thinks the Church was undermining human dignity for all the centuries when it judged separation cases and found that one party wrongfully abandoned the marriage. In 2023, I published a challenge to the Cleveland’s canonists citations of Msgr. Jaeger.

Msgr. Jaeger is a Franciscan priest and is on the canon law faculty at The Pontifical University Antonianum, which is an educational institution founded and run by the Franciscans. He was born into a Jewish family in Israel in 1955 and joined the Church in his early twenties. In 1989, he earned his doctorate in canon law and became the Judicial Vicar in Austin, Texas around 1992 (at thirty-seven years old). In 1999 he went to Rome. In 2011 he was appointed as a judge (i.e. auditor) at the appellate tribunal of the Roman Rota. At the time, Msgr. Pinto, who is reportedly a freemason, was in charge of the Rota. Jaeger also was a consultor for the Pontifical Council for Legislative Text (i.e. canon law). At the time, Cardinal Coccopalmerio, who was reportedly a participant a drug-fueled homosexual orgy in a Vatican apartment, was in charge of the council.