The Vatican announced this week that Pope Francis has made sweeping reforms to the Catholic Church’s marriage annulment process. The new law empowers bishops to fast-track the process of getting an annulment, which has long been criticized as too complicated and expensive. Francis also said that annulments should be free. Without an annulment, divorced Catholics cannot be remarried in the church, nor are they supposed to receive communion if they have remarried outside the Church. According to the Pew Research Center, 1 in 4 Catholics in the US has been divorced, and about a quarter of those say they have sought annulments.