On Friday 8, Francis released Amoris Laetitia – a personal treatise on the modern family that sounds like the name of a slave girl in Up Pompeii. As is typical of everything the Pope says, commentators immediately hit “find” and searched for the word “divorce”. They found not a chapter or a paragraph but a footnote: enough, just about, to suggest that the Pope was determined to allow divorced-and-remarried Catholics to receive Holy Communion. These are the dread words of the now infamous Footnote 351 on handling divorced peoples in new relationships:

‘I want to remind priests that the confessional must not be a torture chamber, but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy’… I would also point out that the Eucharist ‘is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak’.

Liberals and traditionalists both inferred that priests should go easy on the remarried in the confessional and welcome them back into the full life of the Church through reception of Communion. If this was true then it would represent a rupture not only from Church beliefs but the teachings of Christ himself. In Matthew He says of marital unions: “Let no man divide what God has put together.”