Double Trouble

Wanted: two annulments

Like hundreds of thousands of less famous Roman Catholics, New York's Governor Hugh Carey has a divorce problem. He is forbidden to take Communion because he is married to a divorced wom an, glamorous Greek Orthodox Million aire Evangeline Gouletas, who has now been married four times. His church does not recognize divorce at all. Her church does recognize divorce, for numerous rea sons, but allows only two per person.

However, the Catholic Church per mits annulments on several grounds, and two of her marriages might qualify. A third does not count with either church be cause it was a civil ceremony. Her first marriage, to a man named Frank Kallas, initially seemed to be no problem; she said Kallas was dead. But then, only two days after the wedding to Carey, he turned up again, alive and just about to open a restaurant in Califor nia. Mrs. Carey contends her Kallas marriage was invalid in any case because he was married to someone else at the time.

Kallas denies this, but she won a civil divorce from him in 1958 for bigamy and a subsequent Greek Orthodox divorce. Be cause she was only 18 at the time of the marriage, she could also seek an annulment for "lack of due discretion," on grounds that she lacked sufficient judgment to consent to matrimony.

The only remaining obstacle would be her 1966 marriage to Chicago Interior Designer Evangelos Metaxas, which also ended with a Greek Orthodox divorce after five years. "He could not live with women," she has explained. "We simply did not cohabit." The Governor's wife thus might claim lack of due discretion with regard to the Metaxas marriage. Formerly strict Catholic tribunals in the U.S. now accept a wide range of after-the-fact evidence that a spouse was psychologically incapable of entering a true marriage. (The number of U.S. annulments has jumped 5000% in the past decade, to more than 24,000 a year.) The Careys an nounced last week that they will apply for a multiple annulment. That involves presenting evidence before a diocesan tribunal consisting of a judge, aided by a canon lawyer, called defender of the bond, who tries to block the annulment. These days the process has been streamlined in the U.S. Even with appeals it rarely takes more than a year or two.

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