"It wasn't that God didn't bless the union. To put if off on God I didn't feel was valid."

The Vatican has reversed the annulment of the marriage of Sheila Rauch Kennedy and Joseph P. Kennedy (the oldest son of Bobby Kennedy):

"When you try to defend your marriage, the army that comes after you is pretty brutal," Rauch Kennedy said yesterday from her Cambridge home. "You're accused of being a vindictive ex-wife, an alcoholic bigot, an idiot."

Isn't there some reason to see it as vindictive, though?

"In the eyes of the Catholic Church [Kennedy and Rauch Kennedy] are still married and therefore he cannot remarry and maintain good status as a Catholic," said Michelle Dillon, a University of New Hampshire professor who has written extensively about Catholicism. "It means he's stigmatized. . . . But he's not alone. Like the other divorced people in the pews or the people who use contraception or are same-sex couples, he's in a state of sin."

Rauch Kennedy, who is Episcopalian but took required classes with Kennedy to be married in a Catholic church, said she fought the annulment "almost entirely because we had two children."

If you yourself believe divorce is acceptable and the other person needs an annulment in order to go on in life without being in what his religion counts as a state of sin, wouldn't it be better to be generous about it? Wouldn't that be more Episcopalian?