Sister Vivian reflects on 40 years as a founding member of Marriage Tribunal

By Dan Heckel, Mount Saint Joseph Staff

In 1983, Ursuline Sister Vivian Bowles was serving as a psychology professor and director of the counseling center at Brescia College in Owensboro, Ky., when Father Joe Mills made her a unique offer.

In one of Bishop John McRaith’s early moves after he arrived to lead the Diocese of Owensboro, he appointed Father Mills to begin the Office of the Diocesan Tribunal. The office exists “to help divorced people understand their place in the Catholic Church regarding marriage,” according to information from the office. Most people know it as the arbiter of whether a marriage can be considered invalid, thus allowing divorced people an opportunity to remarry in the Catholic Church.

“Bishop McRaith told Father Joe to get competent people who were willing to work together,” Sister Vivian said. “I had just finished my doctorate in counseling psychology and was a licensed marriage and family therapist.”

Also on the team were Father John Vaughan, Father Pat Reynolds, Father Leonard Alvey and Father Kevin Karl (who has since left the priesthood). They began with 100 to 200 cases in which no action had been taken by the diocese.

“We met every week for a whole afternoon,” Sister Vivian said. “Two summers in a row, the bishop paid for us to attend The Catholic University in Washington, D.C., to study the law pertaining to marriage.”

“We got the old cases done first,” Sister Vivian said. “Some of the people had died, some others left and got married in the Protestant church or before a judge. We offered help if they still needed to pursue it.”

Sister Vivian served on the Tribunal until 2008 as perita – a word that translates as “someone who gives an expert opinion.” For the entire 40 years since she began, she has served as an advocate, the first person someone seeking an annulment meets. Sister Vivian serves at St. Alphonsus Parish as director of faith formation, and offers her voluntary advocate ministry there.

“We help decide what will be presented to the Tribunal,” she said. “If you come to me, we will talk it through first. It’s lengthy, you may shed tears. You may get resistance from your family.”

Even cradle Catholics tend to be confused about how the Marriage Tribunal works. Sister Vivian has to deal with a lot of misinformation.

“One myth is that writing a big check is all you need to do to get an annulment,” she said. “That’s not true.” In fact, the diocese doesn’t impose a fee for the annulment process.

Another fallacy is that having a marriage annulled when it has produced children will somehow make the children illegitimate. Catholic annulment is a church matter and has no impact on civil law, and thus has no effect on the legitimacy of the divorced couple’s children, Sister Vivian said.

The Tribunal doesn’t use the term “annulment.” Instead, it uses “declaration of invalidity,” determining if the marriage in question was valid to begin with. Invalidity has to be traced back to the beginning of the marriage at the moment of consent.

The Tribunal includes a judge, sometimes a three-person panel of judges, and a defender of the bond of marriage, all of whom are canon lawyers. When Sister Vivian served as perita, she was to look for any psychological issues in the beginning of the marriage. She found that some people grew up with terrible parenting and couldn’t emulate a healthy marriage. Sometimes an unplanned pregnancy resulted in pressure to get married. Others had unrealistic reasons to marry –such as all their friends were doing it. One of the most common grounds for pursuing an annulment is “grave lack of discretionary judgement at the time of the marriage,” Sister Vivian said.

“You have to have at least three witnesses who offer substantial testimony, people who knew the couple at the time of marriage,” Sister Vivian said. “So many times, we’d have parents say, ‘We begged them not to get married.’”

The main reason divorced people seek an annulment is because they want to get remarried in the Catholic Church. Several of the cases involve non-Catholics who wish to marry a Catholic.

“It’s a difficult process to dig up the past. But it’s a very healing process,” Sister Vivian said. Some people seek an annulment even if they never plan to get remarried, she said. For instance, people who were married to alcoholics and tried to make the marriage work, but could no longer put themselves or their children through the strain may want an annulment for healing, to know themselves better, or to know what to look for in a future partner.

When Sister Vivian began, it was rare for a woman to be named to a Marriage Tribunal. She “got a lot of flak” for her service, she said.

“The Tribunal is a very important arm of the Church, and in 1983 the Church was extremely male dominated,” Sister Vivian said. “Women were not on important committees or involved in legal aspects. Some people couldn’t believe that a woman was being appointed to a tribunal – but the women were happy I was there. A lot of priests said it was about time.”

Sister Vivian never regretted accepting her service on the Tribunal.

“My parents divorced when I was 11,” she said. “There was no tribunal, there was no marriage counseling for Catholics. Everyone in my small town knew my parents were divorced. Later, when I learned about a tribunal, I wished my parents could have done that.”

Sister Vivian never set out to become a marriage counselor. She had a degree in English and was teaching at St. Thomas More School in Paducah, Ky., when a workshop for counselors in public schools was scheduled in nearby Murray. The public school superintendent at the time told Father Henry O’Bryan, the Catholic Schools superintendent, that he needed to get someone trained as a counselor in the Catholic schools. The pastor and principal at St. Thomas More both agreed to send Sister Vivian to the workshop.

“I loved it,” she said. She eventually pursued a master’s degree in counseling from Murray State University, and later earned her doctorate in marriage and family counseling from the University of Arkansas.

“I went into marriage and family counseling because we had a lot of adults at Brescia who were married,” she said. She also contracted to provide marriage counseling through some employee assistance programs, including with the police and fire departments.

“Education is my primary ministry,” she said. “The Marriage Tribunal is a wonderful way to educate people not just on marriage, divorce and annulment, but on the blessings of what the Church is about. Couples take the Church’s perspective on marriage much more seriously than they did the first time.”

Sister Vivian doesn’t subscribe to the thinking that only married people should serve on a Tribunal.

“We all grew up in families,” she said. “And most families now have someone who has been divorced.”

“I told Bishop McRaith our biggest problem is people getting married when they shouldn’t,” Sister Vivian said. That led to the establishment of the Marriage Guidelines for the diocese, which Sister Vivian was very involved in creating. That required marriage preparation courses, either in a group or one-on-one with a married couple.

“I think the Church has used the resources of the social sciences very well in helping with marriage,” Sister Vivian said. “Retrouvaille is a wonderful program for marriages in crisis.” She’s impressed with what the Diocese of Owensboro’s Office of Marriage and Family Life is doing these days to nurture existing marriages.

“Catholics are learning to pray from the heart and to pray together,” Sister Vivian said. In the future, she wants the Church to help people focus more on the sacrament of marriage, rather than on the wedding.

Although Bishop McRaith and Father Mills have both gone to heaven, Sister Vivian said she still thanks them every day for asking her to be on the Marriage Tribunal.

“It’s been one of the most rewarding and enriching experiences of my life,” she said. “I’ve met so many beautiful people and journeyed with them. It’s the toughest examination of conscience they’ll ever make.”n