Word: rota
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From Rome last week seeped word that the Sacred Rota of the Vatican had given to Princess Lee Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy's younger sister, an annulment of her first marriage to transatlantic Socialite Michael Canfield. The ruling, which was quietly handed down in November 1962, left Lee free to celebrate a church wedding last July with her thrice-wed second husband of nearly five years...
...dissolved on earth, and does not permit divorce. It will agree that some marriages were null and void from the beginning, but such cases are rare. In 1962, the diocesan and regional marital courts of the church around the world probably annulled fewer than 2,000 marriages. The Rota, Rome's final court of appeal for most annulment claims, handled only 124 cases, gave decrees of nullity to a mere 64 claimants...
When an archdiocese of Westminster court in London, where the Radziwills live, hemmed and hawed on the case, Lee applied again to Rome, got permission to take her appeal to the Rota...
...Rota served as both a court of first resort and an appeal court, and two panels-each with three ecclesiastical judges-took turns hearing the evidence in the case...
Blow for La Dolce Vita. Many marital cases drag on for ten years or more, but the lawyer who argued Lee's case before the Rota denies that she got any special favor. "I deliberately asked that this case be handled with severity," insists Dr. Fernando Delia Rocca. Since Lee was not saying, and the Rota does not publish its decisions until ten years after the ruling, Vatican insiders could only guess that her grounds were that Canfield refused to have any children...