La disolución del matrimonio rato y no consumado. Estudio de las causas tramitadas en las diócesis españolas

According to article VI of the Agreement on Legal Matters between the Holy See and the Spanish State, as well as article 80 of the Spanish Civil Code, canonical judgments of marriage annulment and Pontifical dissolutions of ratified but non consummated marriages, can reach civil effects in Spain. Pontifical dispensations from non-consummated marriages are, however, resolutions whose access and study is not easy, since the Pontifical rescripts granting the dissolution of the marriage are not published, neither the responses of the Apostolic See rejecting these petitions. They are synthetic resolutions, devoid of legal motivation, quite different from judicial judgments. This requires direct access of researchers to the Diocesan curiae, in order to obtain data from the acts of the case, so he/she might be able to deduce in which facts and legal foundations resolutions are based. Although the statistics published by the Holy See show the total number of procedures for dissolution of non-consummated marriage processed in Spain, it is much more complex to know how these procedures are distributed by diocese: first, because of the amount of Spanish dioceses (70 in all, out of them 69 are territorial and 1 is military). Second, because there are no statistics compiled by the Spanish Bishops’ Conference with the number of procedures started in each diocese. On this issue, the data are, therefore, fragmentary. It seems to be the archdiocese of Madrid the one leading these procedures. We can therefore conclude that these procedures for dissolution of nonconsummated marriage are, in general, quite unknown within the activity of the ecclesiastical courts in matrimonial matters, which represents a significant gap, bearing in mind that resolutions arising from these procedures can achieve, according to the Spanish system, civil effect, once they are approved by a civil judge..