IMAGINE the situation of a Catholic woman who enters a long-term union with a man who has been abandoned by his wife. The devout lady raises the man’s children and bears him another child. Even if she so desired, it is clear that she cannot leave her current relationship without doing harm to her child and stepchildren. Although that conscientious mother is technically an adulteress in the eyes of the church, she not only could but positively should be offered access to holy communion, which is Christianity’s most sacred rite, according to a senior cardinal whose job is to interpret church law.

For Vatican-watchers, this statement by Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, contained in a 30-page booklet which was published this week with clear papal approval, was proof positive of “civil war” raging in the upper echelons of the Catholic church. (Things aren’t much more peaceful, it might be added, in any of the traditional or episcopal Christian confessions where bishops are supposed to set and enforce a common line.) Faced with the cardinal’s apparently humane reflections, conservative Catholic commentators reacted with horror; many called it a scandalous defiance of the position laid down by the late Pope John Paul II, whom the church regards as a saint. According to the Polish pontiff, people who divorce and remarry in a civil ceremony (but remain wedded to their first spouses in the church’s view) can only take communion on one condition: that their new marriages are completely devoid of sex.

Civil war or not, it is no secret that Pope Francis is under open challenge from conservatives, led by America’s Cardinal Raymond Burke, or that the relatively liberal camp around the current pontiff is holding its ground. The immediate bone of contention is a papal document or “exhortation” issued nearly a year ago which appeared, albeit in very oblique language, to open the way for communion to be offered to people in what the church calls irregular unions. Germany’s Catholic bishops have clearly supported the liberal position, while the Vatican’s most senior German, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, is firmly of the opposite view. At the end of January he issued a strong reprimand to anyone who interpreted the new teaching as offering communion to the “adulterous”.

In other signs of rising contention, posters attacking the pope appeared on walls in the centre of Rome on February 4th; and on February 13th, a group of senior prelates who are advising the pope on reforming the Vatican administration issued a statement of unconditional backing. “In relation to recent events, the council of cardinals offers its full support of the work of the pope,” they declared.

Bitterly contested as they are, the issues at stake in this inter-Catholic debate seem rather tame when compared with those considered this week by the ruling synod of the Church of England, where Archbishop Justin Welby suffered a galling setback in his efforts to hold the ring between liberals and conservatives. In the Anglican case, the issue at stake was the church’s attitude to same-sex unions.

The synod effectively threw out a conservative-leaning report by the church’s bishops. Based on three years of “listening” to views on the issue, it affirmed the traditional teaching that marriage was between a man and a woman, while also urging a culture of welcome and support for gay peple and “maximum freedom” in the treatment of same-sex couples. A motion “taking note” of the report needed to win support in separate votes of bishops, laity and clergy, and it was rejected by the latter, by 100 votes to 93. Archbishop Welby said England’s national church would simply have to continue its tortuous reflections on the subject, in a way that was “neither careless in...theology nor ignorant of the world around us”. His tireless efforts to avoid a formal split reflect a belief that if that were to happen, the two or more resulting entities (apart from quarreling over a vast historical inheritance) would eventually shrivel up into diminishing, dysfunctional micro-communities.

What the Catholic and Anglican quarrels have in common, of course, is that both reflect a vast and growing disconnect between the traditional teaching of the church and the way people actually live in historically Christian countries. As Giles Fraser, a liberal Anglican cleric, noted, less than one in five Anglicans now believes that same-sex relationships are “always wrong” and an increasing number of clergy have entered same-sex nuptials as English law allows them to do. He believes that ordinary clergy are in touch with social reality, while many bishops, at least in their public statements, are not.

For traditionalists, an appropriate response to society’s free-wheeling state might be to retreat to society’s outer edge, albeit in small numbers, and preach the old-time religion with undiminished integrity to anyone who will listen. But that is very hard for churches whose habit and culture is to stand confidently in the middle of society, sharing power and prestige with its secular elites. When you have dwelt in the emperor’s palace, it is not easy to become a voice crying in the wilderness.