From The "Catholic Divorce" Department:

You think you know, but you don't know.

WICatholic has posted an excellent article on the scandalous anullment process currently corrupting The Church by Father Clarence Hettinger. The entire article may be found here.

A 1991 Rota decision said, "The continually, daily increasing number of marriage cases especially in some regions of the world in which the ground is defect of discretion of judgment and/or incapacity to assume and fulfill the essential obligations of marriage due to causes of a psychic nature constitutes a grave problem for the Catholic Church regarding the sanctity and stability of the matrimonial bond. Although this phenomenon is to be placed most especially in modern times both in a more profound investigation of anthropology and in a more perfect knowledge of the doctrine about the nature of marriage, there is no one who does not see that 'cases of the nullity of marriage because of the above mentioned grounds are to be handled with the greatest of caution,' as the jurisprudence of our forum advises. The Supreme Pontiff has recalled all this to the mind of all who offer their services in tribunals in the administration of justice, with the purpose and plan that any shadow of arbitrariness in the handling of these kinds of cases should promptly vanish (cf. 1987 allocution, no. 7."1)

"And the Pharisees came up to test him by asking, 'Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any reason whatever?"2 It is well known that, for the liberal Jewish theologians of those times, "any reason" was broad enough to include burning the man's food or having less sex appeal than another woman. Jewish divorce for any reason has its counterpart in the American idea of marriage: "If it doesn't work out I can get a divorce." In both systems "the question concerns not (as in Mark) the legitimacy of divorce but that reasons are sufficient, assuming that it is at least sometimes permitted."3 It remained for our free thinking, licentious, narcissistic age to "progress" beyond the School of Hillel and develop the American idea of marriage into no-hassle, no-fault divorce.

Obviously the United States suffers from a divorce mentality. If you want a divorce you file for divorce and eventually you get a divorce. Now the American divorce mentality has found its exact counterpart in the scandal of a Catholic American annulment mentality, all the more scandalous because it has come to affect non-Catholics and non-Christians as well as Catholics. "Dear Abby," for example, sees the annulment process as just a bit more complicated than the divorce process. You get a divorce. Then you file for an annulment and eventually you get an annulment.