Pope Francis has a mutiny on his hands. Not only have four senior cardinals publicly demanded that he prove to them he is not a heretic, but in various parts of the world leaders of the Church have openly defied him, signalling that they, too, think he has betrayed the faith. The internet is humming with denunciations and petitions along similar lines.

The immediate issue is whether Catholics who are divorced and remarried should receive Holy Communion. The wider questions are whether they are unrepentant sinners and therefore excluded from the mercy of God, and whether a pope is bound by every letter of previous Catholic teaching or has the liberty to make it more sensitive to the reality of people’s lives.

Francis has deliberately done the latter in his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”), published in March. This was his response to two synods of bishops, held in Rome in 2014 and 2015, which discussed Catholic teaching on family life.

It is common ground that not every Catholic who is divorced and remarried has to be regarded as a willing and unrepentant adulterer, who has therefore to be excluded, on those grounds alone, from receiving Holy Communion. The reasoning was spelt out, perhaps surprisingly, by Pope St John Paul II in another apostolic exhortation, Familiaris Consortio, which was also a response to a synod on family life, held in 1980.