'Mummy's boys' unfit to stay wed, says Rome

A London Telegraph article by Nick Pisa carries the headline, 'Mummy's boys' unfit to stay wed, says Rome (Telegraph.co.uk, January 29, 2007).

Judges on the Roman Rota, the top Catholic tribunal in the Vatican, agreed for an undisclosed number of marriages to be annulled on such grounds, according to a review of the judicial year.

They ruled that the "overbearing influence of a mother or father meant that the psychological autonomy needed for marriage was lacking".

On the other hand, the article also reported that Pope Benedict XVI appealed to judges on the panel not to grant annulments freely and said: "Marriage is not a legal structure that human desire can manipulate at its will." Furthermore, the statistics from the last year are of note:

According to the statistics released for 2005, the judges approved just 67 marriage annulments after looking at 1,637 cases. Appeals for marriage annulments were increasing and that, although they arrived from 27 countries, the largest number, 127, came from Italy.