From apostolic times the Church has wrestled with the dilemma of how to defend its belief in the sanctity and permanence of marriage, while at the same time ministering the love and compassion of Christ to those traumatised by the experience of marital breakdown. Timothy Buckley is a Redemptorist priest who produced a report for the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales on the pastoral situation among priests and people. He argues that the theology of the bond of marriage is responsible for an impasse which often limits the Church's official solutions to the granting of annulments. By tracing the history of the teaching on the bond, he concludes that the present discipline is based on disputable theology and he proposes a way forward.