NEW ANGLICAN DIVORCED-REMARRIAGE POLICY: A CANON LAWYERS' RELIEF ACT

News comes from across the Pond, at least as recorded in The Washington Post of January 26th, that the Anglican Church policy that caused so much trouble for, but ultimately didn't stop, Henry VIII is about to change. This one-denomination news might not be of much interest to many Americans, except that the marriages and divorces of the British Royalty and all their titled friends have lately proved of enormous interest to Americans in their millions. This is not to mention the serious discomfort and moral struggle that the ancient policies have inflicted upon at least some Virginians of the Protestant Episcopal persuasion who still come through divorce lawyers' offices even today. The irony in all of this (well, O.K., one of the ironies anyway) is that the Church isn't going to do anything simple, like say the divorced can now remarry. No, it is going to try, in its usual dithering way, to make this into something grander and more complex than what the Roman Catholics now do with their religious "annulments." In short, a group of bishops have published a policy that would, if adopted by the General Synod in 2002, ratify what the Post says a third of England's vicars are already doing: remarrying the divorced. Priests can only do this if (1) the divorced are honest about the reasons for the failure of the first marriage, (2) there's adequate child support, (3) the new spouse is not the cause of the divorce, (4) there has been "a reasonable time" since the divorce, (5) there has only been one divorce (normally), and (6) the local priest, after consulting with the bishop, feels like it. Whether the Church is going to have canon lawyers passing on things like the adequacy of child support, or call on ordinary divorce lawyers to advise them for such purposes, has not yet been addressed.