(37) “Some Pharisees came up to him and said, to test him, ‘May a man divorce his wife for any reason whatever?’  He replied, ‘Have you not read that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female, and declared, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and cling to his wife, and the two shall become as one’? Thus they are no longer two but one flesh.  Therefore, let no man separate what God has joined.’. They said to him, ‘Then why did Moses command divorce and the promulgation of a divorce decree?’  ‘Became of your stubbornness Moses let you divorce your wives,’ he replied; ‘but at the beginning it was not that way’” (Mt 19:3-8).  These words of the Lord are well known, like the reaction of the disciples: “If that is the case between man and wife, it is better not to marry” (Mt 19:10).  This reaction was certainly framed in the prevailing mentality of the time, a mentality that broke with the Creator’s original plan.[85][85]  The concession by Moses expressed the presence of sin which took on the form of a “duritia cordis”.  Today, perhaps more than in other eras, this obstacle of the intelligence must be taken into consideration, the hardening of the will, the fixation of the passion, which is the hidden root of many of the factors of fragility that influence the present spread of de facto unions.