Misleading Statistics

I finished reading a book recently about marriage. It discussed the many problems in today's Catholic marriages, and gave some good points on how Catholics have been misled about what marriage is (and is not). It also gave some statistics about annulments, and though I agreed with many of the points the author made, I was very disappointed with how misleading those statistics were.

He took the total number of annulments in America over the last few decades, compared those to the total number of marriages, and said that there are so many annulments that it is clear that priests are not teaching their people how to stay married and so the vast majority of marriages are failing. Not true; completely not true.

Let me give some personal statistics. In my 12 years as a Catholic priest I have done about 40 marriages. In that same time I have worked on about 100 annulments. Those numbers are obviously included in the totals that the above author refers to in his book. Yet, they do not give an accurate representation of what he claimed.

Those annulments that I worked on were not for 100 different people. In fact, I have helped a number of people who were converting to the Church get as many 5 or 6 annulments for prior marriages. While those people added a large number to the annulment list, they only added one to the number of marriages. They only married once after receiving their declarations of nullity (and they are still married today!). The number of annulments clearly do not reflect a balance with the number of marriages.

There is another layer to this. The vast majority of annulment proceedings I helped with were not for Catholic marriages (probably only about 10% were). The majority were for people who were preparing to be received into the Church and needed to validate their current invalid marriage. There are more annulments today than there used to be precisely because there are more people converting to the Catholic faith today than there were in the past, and many of those people need to have multiple marriages declared null.

The large number of annulments in these USA do not say that Catholic priests are not preparing their people correctly as much as it says that those outside the Church are not preparing them rightly (yes, I know there are priests who fail to prepare their people for marriage, but that is another issue -- the statistics just do not make that clear). Yet, what else would we expect from people who do not agree with the Church's view of holy matrimony?

This goes to show that we can have numbers but they will not necessarily represent what we say they represent. Furthermore, it says that few people outside the Church really know what marriage is all about (should we be surprised?). We live in a selfish society of people who enter into marriage with the expectation that the new spouse is there to make them happy (which is not a presumed part of marriage). When we have selfish motives and desires, we should expect to be disappointed.

I do not know the author of the book I mentioned, but I can say that he was not careful about his statistics. Sadly, I was hoping to be able to recommend the book to others, but I cannot do so in good conscience. The statistics on annulments actually say more about how the Church is healing the wounds and correcting the mistakes of a large number of people who are coming into the Church. Do priests need to do a better job in pre-marriage prep? Yes, absolutely. Are the statistics of annulments in these USA a determining factor in this? No.