Catholic Marriage

When the dissolution of a Roman Catholic marriage hits the front pages, non-Catholics are often lost in a maze of civil and church legalities. Last week's case in point was the broken union of Sloan and Bill O'Dwyer, and it provided a good capsule course in Catholic marriage law.

In 1948, when the 32-year-old model caught the smiling Irish eye of the 58-year-old mayor of New York, they had both been married before. Mayor William O'Dwyer was two years a widower. In 1938, Texas-born, convent-bred Sloan Simpson had married an insurance executive named Carroll Dewey Hipp, a Protestant, in a civil ceremony, was divorced from him five years later. The Archdiocese of New York granted her a "declaration of free state," permitting her to marry again. Catholics are not recognized by the church as married unless they have had a Catholic wedding (though for non-Catholics the church holds a civil marriage to be binding). So, in 1949, Sloan Simpson and Bill O'Dwyer were duly married at St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church in Stuart, Fla.

The Three Separations. Last January, after the Republican victory had brought an end to Democrat O'Dwyer's ambassadorship to Mexico, he announced that Mexico's Archbishop Luis Maria Martinez had granted him and Sloan a "temporary separation."

Temporary separation is the mildest of the three methods by which the Catholic Church may part a Catholic couple. It may be granted by a bishop on any grounds considered injurious to the bodily, mental or spiritual health of one of the partners, and merely frees the injured partner of the obligation of cohabitation.

Temporary separations may last a lifetime. "Permanent" separations are granted only on the ground of uncondoned adultery on the part of one partner in the marriage. Neither a temporary nor a permanent separation permits remarriage.

The third and rarest form of canonical separation is annulment--the church's finding that no true marriage ever existed. Annulments are granted through a system of three ecclesiastical courts, the highest of which is the Rota in Rome, and for the following principal reasons: impotence, consanguinity, force and fear. During 1952 the Rota granted only 74 annulments out of 188 applications.

Mortal Sin? Mexico's Archbishop Martinez indicated that the case of Sloan and Bill O'Dwyer was under study and might lead to a permanent separation or annulment. But Sloan was not content to wait. Last week it was disclosed that she had sued her husband in a Mexican civil court last February on the ground of mental cruelty. Said her petition: "The irascible character of my husband, which in time led to almost continual threats and insults, is the cause of all our trouble."

Last week, while Sloan was vacationing in Spain at the ranch of wealthy Banker Pedro Gandarias, O'Dwyer said in Mexico City that as a Catholic he could not recognize the civil action. Sloan said that she had hoped a church annulment would come through simultaneously with a civil divorce; she indicated that she had no intention of putting herself in a state of mortal sin by remarrying without one. On the advice of church authorities, she is planning to return to Mexico to be interrogated by an ecclesiastical council.

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