The Church, founded by divine will as an instrument for the salvation of mankind, has ordained ministers (initially the apostles and later their successors, the bishops and, as collaborators with them, the priests and, to a lesser extent, the deacons), to whom she wished to communicate the power to administer the treasures of salvation that Christ, by carrying out the work of redemption, has obtained for us. To exercise this function of administration, from the beginning, the pilgrim Church on this earth has made use of the law.

Within the broad field of law are the norms that regulate the right of the faithful to contract marriage. Through this means, the Church, over the centuries, has sought to protect juridically both the goodness contained in marriage (for the good of the faithful themselves, the Church and society), and the orderly unfolding of the right of the faithful to contract it. One of the goods protected is indissolubility, which means that a member of the faithful cannot remarry if he or she was previously validly married. Given the importance of marriage, the Church resorted to the judicial process, as an instrument of juridical culture, which, providing sufficient guarantees, made it possible to reach certainty about the validity or nullity of marriage.

The rules on the regulation of these processes have known variations throughout history. All of them with the intention of defending the goodness of marriage with the most appropriate instruments for each era. Faced with the problems of slowness in the processes of declaration of nullity, a commission, appointed by the Pope, has prepared these norms that aim to make the process for the declaration of matrimonial nullity more agile, but no less true. The main lines that have guided this reform are contained in the preamble of this rule (Motu proprio) that the Pope has just released. The following could be highlighted:

1. The possibility for only one judge to intervene in a case. Until now, each case had to be examined by a high school of at least three judges.

2. The suppression of double conformity. Until now, the faithful who requested the nullity of their marriage could not remarry until they obtained two sentences (which means the intervention of two tribunals) in conformity (declaring the nullity for the same reason). This requirement established by Benedict XIV (XVIII century) has been suppressed, so that with a single sentence recognizing the nullity, the faithful can marry without waiting for a second tribunal to ratify it.

3. The possibility of resorting to a new, very abbreviated nullity process for those cases specified in the rule (which reflect the juridical experience of the ecclesiastical Courts) in which the nullity is supported by particularly evident reasons.