How dare they? Celibate, unmarried, male priests in a religious club that excludes women from power have set themselves up, for the past 23 years, as the arbiters of marriage. They demand that their petitioners strip themselves emotionally, sexually, psychologically and financially, producing witnesses on command. One witness divulged to the Galway Regional Marriage Tribunal: "(She) wore very short dresses and used to drink. . . the way she behaved led to men inviting her out. I'm not suggesting that there was anything sexual involved. (Her husband) reacted by becoming nasty and extremely jealous."
After enduring such humiliation by friends, neighbours, in-laws, family doctors and whoever else can be persuaded to testify in words that seem to come out of a bad soap opera, a positive result, for the petitioners, is the shame of being told that their marriages never existed. For the rest, there is the limbo of separation without annulment. Now that we have civil divorce, this scenario seems dark and distant - but it is not. This has been going on throughout the 1990s. There are people today living with the consequences.
Civil divorce has taken the sting out of the tribunals' tails. As if to redress its loss of power, one tribunal has revealed its secrets in a new book, which claims that marriage breakdown is caused by a lack of emotional intimacy before marriage. Sexual and emotional intimacy is not a subject which many people would regard Catholic priests as being experts on. Then again, they do have certain privileged information.
The powerful Catholic marriage tribunals have always been secretive, so there is quite a buzz going about the first ever disclosure of the human disasters heard by one of them. The sociological kiss-and-tell in question is When Strangers Marry: A Study of Marriage Breakdown in Ireland, by Albert McDonnell, a priest in the diocese of Killaloe and a former member of the Galway Regional Marriage Tribunal.
His title gives away his analysis of the problem. But if you ask me, strangers getting married isn't the problem. It's when people really get to know each other that they want to divorce. However, McDonnell's argument is that two-thirds of couples had sex before marriage and were physically intimate, while remaining emotionally estranged. To hear him tell it, priests rubber-stamp engaged couples for matrimony and in most cases fail to spot the couples who should have been wearing matching his-and-hers T-shirts emblazoned with the words: "Big Mistake". The Catholic Church's pre-marriage courses are a disaster, focusing on finances and property rather than on emotional matters. Cosy group counselling weekends for engaged couples provide ideal opportunities for the reticent to hide from objective scrutiny.
McDonnell bases his analysis on evidence presented by couples to the Galway Regional Marriage Tribunal, which is one of four set up in the Republic in 1976 by the Catholic Church. In 1993, the tribunal accepted 136 petitions (an average annual number) from desperate couples who believed themselves to be in need of annulment. By 1997 - a full four years later - the tribunal had made judgments in only 80 of 136 cases.
How dare they?
Left wriggling on the hook, who knows what pain these couples suffered as they awaited judgment. The 80 lucky ones on whom judgments were made, became the material for McDonnell's study. For the remaining 56 couples, there was no closure. Some had given up on the tribunal because a spouse would not co-operate or because a person they hoped to marry after the desired annulment evaporated from the scene. But many of the separated people abandoned the tribunal out of "disenchantment with the detailed nature of the procedure".
McDonnell doesn't expand on what he means by "detailed", but a reading of his book reveals that couples were spared nothing in questioning. Two-thirds of the 80 had serious sexual problems, often based on a lack of trust by women who felt they could not submit to men who regarded sexual intercourse as an act of dominance to be pursued when drunk and "tantamount to rape".
McDonnell writes: "Pornography and psychological violence were features of some marriages. One wife described her husband as "unbelievably demanding in terms of sexual intimacy. He saw it as love. . . he saw it as the number one thing in life. How I felt didn't matter. He had hardcore pornographic books and films."
Another woman stated: "He kept telling me that I was frigid. He combined all this with being jealous of me. If he saw me talking to a man, then I was a prostitute."
McDonnell also tells us that "the violence involved in marital rape was extreme and the sexual practices dangerous." One woman stated: "He actually tried to insert an (object) in my vagina. It was horrible." In McDonnell's analysis, "a common feature in these cases was that sexual intercourse ceased to be a reflection of a loving relationship and became a form of control or self-indulgence for the man."
His insight is unarguable, but McDonnell also has a blindspot. Perhaps because he is a priest, McDonnell does not acknowledge the role of the Catholic Church in forming a society in which women are second-class citizens. The whore/virgin model of womanhood, supported by the Catholic Church, helps to push women - and men - into the pathetic marital situations that end up in tribunals and divorce courts.
Most of the women were dissatisfied sexually, says McDonnell. Could that be because they dared not be otherwise? One man told the tribunal that his partner "went through agonies of guilt about sexual intimacy". A woman stated: "(He) would have pushed for sexual intimacy. I wouldn't have been happy about being so involved pre-marriage."
McDonnell describes women who used sexual favours as bargaining chips on the road to the altar. "It is noteworthy that all references to moral considerations are made by women," he says. He fails to see that the women were also using sex as a lever to get what they wanted. Particularly vulnerable were the 20 per cent who had babies before marriage and 8.7 per cent had babies with other men. Seeing themselves as damaged goods, thanks to Catholic morality, they were conditioned to want the security of a marriage vow at any cost.
The tribunal's caseload reveals that, with few exceptions, men were determined to have sex and women were anxious to remain saints: the classic Catholic guilt-trip. McDonnell blames this destructive sexual tension on a lack of intimacy, which he sees as being promoted by a liberal society. I blame a church that tells people that their natural sexual urges are sinful without a marriage certificate.
Nearly 64 per cent had sexual intercourse before marriage, 27.5 per cent lived together during courtship and 37.5 per cent experienced premarital pregnancy. Many of the pregnant women married because they believed that marriage was preferable to abortion. But the role of the Church in such shotgun weddings is not acknowledged by McDonnell. Why be forced to choose between abortion and marriage? Why not have a baby and remain unmarried?
Increasingly, Irish women are doing just that, but the women in McDonnell's study were unable to break the chains of Catholic convention. Again and again, the cases in McDonnell's text speak of women caught between a rock and a hard place. Young, poorly educated and stuck in social classes III, IV and V, many were pushed by family into marrying men who were regarded as economically desirable. You had to feel sorry for the young men being used in this way. Most of the men in the study were poorly educated farmers, although many had high opinions of themselves. "My wife knew that I was playing around but she didn't complain to me. She probably decided that it wouldn't make any difference," one husband testified.
A proper, long engagement would reveal such tendencies, McDonnell believes. The average length of "courtship", as McDonnell quaintly puts it, was three years - a long time, but lacking in depth.
"A feature of superficial courtships is their group nature. Many couples, despite spending a lot of time together, did not relate on a deep level. A witness described such a courtship: "He went to the pub about five nights and she would be with him. . . it all seemed lovey-dovey in those days. She followed him around and didn't ask any questions."
The real problem is women who follow the Church and don't ask any questions. Optimistic women, reared on the white dresses of holy communion and matrimony, somehow hope that at the altar love-lightning will strike with Barbie-brightness so that they will live happily ever after. By the time the reception is over, they realise their mistake.
The antidote to such folly is engagement, says McDonnell, arguing that engagement should become an important public ceremony to mark the serious step that the couple are taking and a time during which emotional intimacy can develop. But total intimacy is not - and cannot be - a prelude to marriage. Marriage nurtures intimacy, by providing the commitment within which two people can take the risks required of intimacy. You don't need heart-stopping, 100 per cent emotional intimacy from the very beginning in order to have a successful marriage. What you need is the capacity to be intimate.
"The Catholic vision of marriage stresses permanence and a modicum of self-sacrifice," says McDonnell. How dare they? With a vision like that, what chance does Catholic marriage - or any marriage - have?