On Tuesday, Pope Francis issued new rules governing the annulment of marriages, the process Catholics have to go through to officially dissolve their marriage and remarry in the Catholic Church. The modifications to canon law are designed to speed up the process for open-and-shut cases, or those where both spouses request the annulment or don't oppose it, and they can be administered by the bishop of each diocese or a priest-judge of his choosing, a reform aimed at dioceses in poorer countries that don't have three-judge church tribunals. The new church regulations also scrap automatic appeals, and allow for at least some annulments free of charge. The annulment process has been criticized as long, expensive, and unduly burdensome, discouraging divorced Catholics from participating in the church and its sacraments.
Pope Francis noted in his new law that marriage is still a permanent union, but added "lack of faith" as a reason why a marriage was never valid in the first place. The new rules aren't meant to make it easier to declare marriages null and void, he said, but rather "the salvation of souls."
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