The changes do not merely streamline the existing annulment process, as many expected, by removing a mandatory review of each decision. They promise a fast-track option, to be implemented at the discretion of local bishops, that would allow annulments to be granted in no more than 45 days if both parties consent and certain personal factors are involved. Since that list of factors seems capacious and varied, in effect the pope is offering bishops the chance to expedite most annulment petitions involving consenting ex-spouses, without fear of rebuke from Rome.

This is a major liberalization of the church’s rules, probably the most significant of Francis’ pontificate to date. In the United States, home to about half the world’s annulments, the process already errs on the side of the petitioners, but even in the U.S. the path is lengthy and rigorous; it’s just that the American Catholic Church has the resources and personnel to keep the wheels moving. Whereas the new policy might actually make the process easier than secular divorce, depending on what individual bishops choose to do.

What the new rules do not do, however, is explicitly change the church’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage, in the way that admitting the remarried to communion absent an annulment would. This may seem like theological hair-splitting, but from the point of view of Catholic unity it’s crucial. Fast-tracking annulments weakens the credibility of Catholic doctrine, in both implication and effect. But it does not formally reverse the church’s teaching about the nature of marriage and communion.

Which is why annulment reform has long been seen as a possible compromise between the two sides of this Catholic civil war. What Francis has done is clearly a liberal move, more liberal than I expected. But it’s still not the wider opening on sex and marriage that many progressive Catholics sought, since it doesn’t imply (as Kasper’s proposal does) that cohabiting and same-sex couples — and, in African societies, the polygamous — might also be welcomed to communion. And while it gives conservative Catholics grounds for dismay and critique, it doesn’t directly undercut belief in the pope’s infallibility or the permanence of doctrine.

But what does it mean that Francis has made this move pre-emptively, before the next half of the synod begins? Perhaps, as the veteran Vaticanista John Allen suggests, he wants to dial down the synod’s temperature, avoid more pitched battles over Kasper’s proposal, and create “space for other issues to emerge.” This seems plausible, especially since the new rules address many of the cases that presumably made the Kasper proposal appealing in the first place.