One of the “hardest sayings” of Jesus in the Gospel remains His teaching on divorce, in which He revokes the license that Moses had given the Jews to dispose of wives (not husbands) at will. (See Matt. 19: 3-12.) Christ ends with the ringing line: “And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery.”

The apostles’ reaction was telling: “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” (Matt. 19:10) Our Lord answers their objection with what seems to be a shrug — and makes this a teaching moment where He introduces the idea of religious celibacy: “[T]here are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.” (Matt 19:12) Not very pastoral, if you ask me.

Christians over the centuries have struggled with this teaching, and over time most churches have succumbed, one way or the other, and reverted to Old Testament practice. The Orthodox church, while affirming the lifelong character of marriage, for various reasons began to allow Christians whose first marriages had failed to marry again — albeit not in a festive manner, but via a ceremony whose dominant note is penitential. Those in second marriages are called to atone for the failure of their first, but are not expected to avoid marital intercourse.

Most Protestant churches, which venerate marriage as a covenant but not a sacrament, clung to the biblical teaching at first. But many of these churches began to make exceptions, and by the mid-twentieth century divorce was becoming mainstream even for faithful Protestants. That left Catholics mostly alone, among world religions, in resisting the tide of marital dissolution.

And for some decades, Catholics’ divorce rate lagged far behind that of other Christians, as even unhappy spouses resisted the prospect of leaving their church marriages for either legally sanctioned adultery, or a life of celibacy.

Then the Sexual Revolution hit, just after the Second Vatican Council had put in progress a series of jarring reforms to church discipline and liturgy, changes which ordinary Catholics (encouraged by liberal clergy and nuns) misinterpreted as a sign that all bets were off. If the church could revolutionize something as central as its liturgy, they imagined, surely its dusty old marriage laws would be the next thing to go. So many Catholics acted accordingly, and began to divorce and remarry at rates not much lower than the rest of the population.

But the Catholic church didn’t change its teaching. Indeed, it can’t, without committing institutional suicide.

The Church is bound to the indissolubility of marriage by a declaration of the Council of Trent, which Catholics regard as being every bit as binding as the Council of Nicaea that affirmed the divinity of Christ. If a pope or a council overturned that teaching, it would completely discredit the Church’s teaching authority. So if Pope Francis were to follow the German bishops who want him to allow for Catholic divorce and remarriage — albeit behind a screen of “pastoral” smoke and mirrors — he would be disproving his own authority, showing that either the Holy Spirit wasn’t behind the Council of Trent, or He wasn’t behind this pope now. But neither assertion is compatible with Catholicism.

As Ross Douthat has written, in that situation faithful Catholics would have a worldwide meltdown. I suspect that many would claim that such a pope had lost his authority, and try to depose or replace him. (Friends of mine have a guessing game as to which bishop would rise up and claim to be the new, “true” pope.) But there is no mechanism in the church for doing that. In my opinion, the intellectually honest course in that case would be to admit that the Eastern Orthodox were right all along in insisting that papal authority had been exaggerated. It would be time to swim not the Tiber but the Bosporus, and join the Orthodox church.

Constrained by this attachment to lifelong marriage, but pressured by millions of Catholics whose marriages had failed, many bishops around the world have mostly surrendered in practice, while insisting on a fig leaf of respect for official church teaching. To do this, they turned to the long-standing process of annulment. An annulment is a decree that a given marriage had not really taken place, because one or more of the conditions required for making it valid was never present. There are real and valid reasons for granting an annulment: for instance, if one of the parties was kidnapped, coerced, insane or under age. The Vatican has been dispensing annulments for centuries in cases like these. But liberal priests and bishops did not view annulments as what they are — rare, exceptional events that recognize an injustice, such as a girl who was married by force.

Instead, many bishops, especially in America, began to hand out annulments to almost anyone who asked, on spurious psychological grounds such as “emotional immaturity.” In my own Catholic high school, the quarters that once housed Christian Brothers (who all cleared out after Vatican II) were turned into an annulment tribunal with the highest “success” rate in the world. Some 99 percent of marriages examined in that tribunal turned out to have been invalid. Nor was my diocese an outlier. As John Allen recently wrote, even today, “the United States accounts for at least half, and sometimes more, of all the annulments granted by the Catholic Church every year, even though it represents only 6 percent of the global Catholic population.”

That means one of two things: a) We Americans are very good at faking annulments of perfectly valid marriages, so that couples can contract second, adulterous marriages with a clear conscience; or b) We are very bad at performing valid marriages. American Catholic marriages today are a lot less reliable than American cars built in the 1980s. Perhaps it is time for imports?

Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI thought so; they saw the American annulment rate as an international scandal, and tried to tighten the rules from Rome, making it harder for local bishops to accommodate the divorce culture, and giving some support for those spouses who didn’t want their marriages (sometimes of 20 or 30 years, with multiple children) declared in retrospect null and void. An abandoned Kennedy wife, Sheila Rauch Kennedy, famously fought her powerful husband’s annulment petition — and when she lost had the bad manners to write a book exposing what a farce the procedure had become.

Pope Francis has apparently reversed most of the reforms that the previous two popes imposed, and made annulments easier, quicker and cheaper. That surely will mean that they will become more common.

What were his motives for doing that? Veteran Vatican reporter John Allen believes that Francis wanted to defuse the growing crisis between the Vatican and the German church — some of whose bishops have threatened to openly flout the pope’s authority unless he allows divorced and remarried (but not annulled) Catholics to receive Communion, which would mean that their second marriages weren’t sinful.

There aren’t many practicing, faithful Catholics left in Germany, but that doesn’t mean that a schism would be trivial; German Catholics send millions to the Vatican every year through that country’s curious “church tax,” to which every registered Catholic contributes via payroll deduction, on pain of excommunication. If Germany cut off that money, Pope Francis would have to suspend most of the Vatican’s spending on missions and aiding the poor. Such a schism might very well spread through other countries in Europe where the Catholic population is mostly well to the left of even their bishops.

So instead of changing church doctrine and driving faithful Catholics like Ross Douthat into the arms of an antipope or the Orthodox church, or writing off the whole German church and all its money, it seems the pope has steered a middle ground: permitting the mass abuse of annulments to continue. Allen notes wryly in his article that Francis is “a savvy political thinker.”

In Part II of this article, I will examine why American Catholics are so bad at contracting valid marriages, and what Pope Francis should do to rescue Catholic marriage from the scandal of easy annulments, and restore the church’s witness to the holiness and permanence of Christian marriage.