by Raffy Gutierrez
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Chapter 7: Divorce for the Rich, Suffering for the Poor
Let us begin with a word.
The word is annulment.
The Catholic Church will tell you that an annulment is not a divorce. And technically, within Catholic theology, that is correct. A divorce dissolves a valid marriage. An annulment declares that a valid marriage never existed in the first place — that something was missing from the beginning that prevented the union from ever being a genuine sacramental bond.
That is the theological distinction. It is real within Catholic doctrine.
Now let us talk about what an annulment actually is in practice.
You were married. Now you are not. You are free to marry someone else.
That is also what a divorce is.
The theological description of how you arrived at that outcome differs. The outcome is identical. And if the outcome is identical — if both processes end with the same result, the same freedom, the same ability to begin again — then the Church’s insistence that annulment is categorically different from divorce is a distinction that serves the institution far more than it serves the people inside the broken marriage.
There is, however, one difference between annulment and divorce that is not theological. It is not spiritual. It has nothing to do with the sanctity of the sacrament or the permanence of the bond.
It is the cost.
What an Annulment Actually Costs
An annulment in the Philippines requires the filing of a petition in the Regional Trial Court. It requires legal representation. It requires a psychological evaluation by a certified psychologist. It requires a Church tribunal process. In many cases it requires appeals through multiple levels of civil and ecclesiastical proceedings.
The minimum realistic cost as of 2024: approximately PHP 200,000.
Cases involving complications — contested proceedings, appeals, multiple psychological evaluations — can exceed PHP 500,000 to PHP 1,000,000.
The process takes a minimum of three years. It frequently takes five or more.
Now set that against this number: the median monthly family income in the Philippines is approximately PHP 22,000.
The minimum cost of an annulment represents approximately nine months of median family income. Not nine months of savings — nine months of total income, every peso of it, before rent, before food, before school fees, before anything else a family needs to survive.
For the majority of Filipino families, a civil annulment is not merely difficult to obtain.
It is effectively impossible.
The System in Plain Language
What this means, stated without euphemism, is this:
If you are wealthy in the Philippines, your marriage is not indissoluble. You can end it. You can access the psychological evaluation, hire the canon lawyer, navigate the tribunal process, wait out the years, and emerge on the other side legally free to remarry.
If you are poor in the Philippines, your marriage is indissoluble. Not because God decided this. Not because the doctrine applies differently to different income brackets. But because the only legal mechanism for ending your marriage costs more than you will earn in a year, and nobody is offering you a payment plan.
The annulment system is a class-based system. The rich can leave. The poor must stay. Placing a Catholic seal on this arrangement does not make it sacred. It makes it unjust.
Canon 1095 and the No-Fault Divorce Nobody Calls That
The 1983 revision of the Code of Canon Law introduced Canon 1095. In plain language, it provides that if either party can be shown to have had insufficient psychological capacity to understand and accept the full obligations of marriage at the time of the wedding, the marriage can be declared null.
Read that again slowly.
If either party lacked sufficient psychological capacity — an extraordinarily broad standard — the marriage never existed as a valid sacrament.
A skilled canon lawyer can construct a psychological incapacity argument around almost any failed marriage. The marriage failed. That failure itself becomes evidence of psychological incapacity at the time of the wedding. The argument is almost infinitely flexible.
What determines whether you can access this provision is not whether your marriage has failed. It has. What determines it is whether you can afford the process of proving it.
This is, in everything but name, a no-fault divorce mechanism available exclusively to those with the financial resources to access it.
The Hypocrisy Architecture
The CBCP opposes civil divorce on the grounds that marriage is indissoluble. This is their public position. This is what they bring to every Senate hearing, every pastoral letter, every statement to the press.
But the institution the CBCP represents dissolves marriages routinely.
Through annulments. Through the Pauline Privilege — drawn from 1 Corinthians 7, allowing dissolution when an unbeliever abandons a believing spouse. Through the Petrine Privilege — which permits the Pope himself to dissolve a valid sacramental marriage involving one unbaptized party. Through non-consummation dissolutions, which allow the Pope to dissolve a valid marriage at any time for any reasonable cause simply because it was never physically consummated.
The grounds available for dissolving a marriage through the Church’s own processes have expanded significantly and repeatedly over the centuries. The Church that insists marriage is indissoluble has built an extensive internal architecture for dissolving marriages.
The difference — the only morally significant difference — is who can access it.
A Filipino with sufficient money and the right legal and canonical advice can end their marriage through the Church’s own system. Their marriage, it turns out, is dissoluble after all.
A Filipino without sufficient money cannot. Their marriage remains indissoluble. Not because the theology applies to them more strictly. Because the process is beyond their financial reach.
The doctrine of indissolubility, as actually practiced in the Philippines, does not protect the sanctity of marriage. It protects the wealthy’s access to legal exits while providing no equivalent protection — and no equivalent exit — to the poor. It enforces permanent suffering on those without resources while providing resourced exits to those with them.
And then it calls the whole arrangement God’s will.
What Congressman Lagman Saw
The late Representative Edcel Lagman — one of the most persistent champions of divorce legislation in Philippine history — stated it with characteristic precision:
“Religion does too much hypocrisy — they themselves have canonical divorce called dissolution of marriage.”
He was right. The canonical dissolution of marriage is divorce. The Pauline Privilege is divorce. The Petrine Privilege is divorce. The annulment granted on grounds of psychological incapacity after a marriage of twenty years is, in every practical sense, divorce.
The Church opposes divorce. The Church practices divorce. The difference is that the Church’s version costs PHP 200,000 to PHP 1,000,000 and takes five years — which means it is available to some Filipinos and structurally unavailable to most.
What This Chapter Has Established
The annulment system is the private face of the doctrine’s injustice. In public, the Church defends the sacred indissolubility of marriage. In practice, the Church dissolves marriages — for those who can afford the process.
What the current system produces is not the protection of marriage. It is a two-tier system in which access to legal relief from a broken marriage is determined not by the severity of the breakdown, not by the evidence of harm, not by the welfare of the children — but by the size of the petitioner’s bank account.
That is not a theological position.
It is a class policy.
It is the enforcement of permanent legal imprisonment on the poor while the wealthy purchase their freedom through a process the institution insists is categorically different from the thing it refuses to allow.
A rose by any other name still costs PHP 200,000.
And the woman who cannot afford it is still trapped.
— End of Chapter 7 —
Next week: Chapter 8 — What Actually Happens. The CBCP’s prediction of catastrophic family breakdown has already been tested — in Italy, Ireland, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, and every other Catholic-majority nation that legalized divorce before the Philippines. Their data exists. Their outcomes are measurable. And the prediction failed every single time. Free, in full, every week, right here in The City Post. If this made you think, share it with someone who needs to.
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Raffy Gutierrez writes a weekly column on politics, religion, and civil society. The views expressed are solely his own.
