By Gretchen Keiser

All annulment cases that are being decided upon by the archdiocese’s Metropolitan Tribunal will now also be reviewed by a second newly established appeals court in Atlanta.

The archdiocese recently received word officially from the Vatican establishing a provincial appeals court for marriage cases in Atlanta. Father Edward J. Dillon, who was officialis, or presiding judge, of the new appeals court. Father Peter A. Dora is now presiding judge of the Tribunal, where marriage cases are first heard.

The change means that annulment cases from the Archdiocese of Atlanta and also from the dioceses of Savannah, Charleston, S.C., and Charlotte and Raleigh, N.C. will automatically come for review to Atlanta.

It is brought about by the new Code of Canon Law, which governs church life and went into effect the First Sunday in Advent, 1983.

Under the new code every marriage case which receives a ruling from the local Tribunal granting an annulment will automatically have to be reviewed by an appeals court. In the past it was possible for a tribunal to receive a dispensation from the appeals court review process in cases where an annulment was granted and many tribunals did seek dispensations, Father Dillon said.

When the new Code went into effect the existing appeals courts were suddenly flooded with cases to review, which created a backlog of cases and threatened to lengthen dramatically the amount of time each case would be in process. Even if a local Tribunal gave a favorable ruling in a particular case, the annulment would not be granted until that ruling had been affirmed by the appeals court.

The procedure in the Atlanta Metropolitan Tribunal had always been something of an exception to the prevailing method nationally, Father Dillon said, and enabled the archdiocese to be better prepared to respond to the changes in the new Code of Canon Law.

For example, Atlanta marriage cases had always been appealed to the Baltimore, Md. Appeals court, even before such appeals were mandatory. So, the change in the Code did not cause a change in procedure in the archdiocese’s handling of marriage cases; in addition, the Tribunal already had the staff and procedures in place to accommodate the appeal process.

Secondly, Atlanta had already served as an appeals court for Savannah, Charleston, Raleigh and Charlotte – the other dioceses in the geographical area which makes up the Province of Atlanta.

So, the request for the creation of a provincial appeals court in Atlanta was a response to the need which Tribunal officials could see would emerge as the new Code took effect and pressure on the Baltimore appeals court increased.

“We anticipated that the length of time (for a marriage case to be decided) would increase to an unacceptable length,” Father Dillon said. By asking for permission to establish a court in Atlanta capable of reviewing Atlanta cases, the Tribunal hoped to offset that occurrence.

Father Dillon and Father Dora said the preparation had borne fruit over the last few months when the Code took effect. “The process of changeover slowed us down, but it didn’t shut us down as it did in some tribunals,” Father Dillon said. Tribunals which instituted the appeals process on a regular basis for the first time had to stop accepting new marriage cases temporarily in order to adjust to the workload, he said. “We didn’t have to do that,” he said.

The officials estimated that a marriage case would take approximately nine to 10 months to be decided and appealed – beginning not from the time a person first meets with a parish priest to discuss a possible annulment, but from the time the person has the first meeting with Tribunal personnel who will be handling the case.

At one point, that time estimate had increased to about 12 months when the appeals process slowed down in the United States.

While the process of appealing cases takes additional time, Father Dillon believes strongly that it increases the quality of work done by local Tribunals in researching Church law and applying it carefully and justly in individual cases.

“You’re much more careful in your work if you know somebody is going to take a look at it,” he said. “I think that there is a value to the appeal.”

In order for an annulment to be granted, both the local Tribunal and the appeals court must give a ruling in favor of the annulment. If the lower court rules against an annulment, the appeals court could overturn that ruling and then a third court would have to give a ruling in favor of the annulment. The decisions of the Atlanta Tribunal have been overwhelmingly upheld by the Baltimore appeals court.

In order to ensure impartiality, the Atlanta appeals court is separate from the Tribunal and appeals court judges will be given only those decisions to review which they were not involved in at the local level.

Father Dillon said he and two appeals court judges will be meeting twice a week on a rotating basis to begin reviewing the decisions on more than 100 pending cases.