By his emphasis on the Catholic Church being “of and for the poor” Pope Francis has adopted a perspective of the Latin American theology of liberation. That theology makes a radical challenge to many of the comfortable presuppositions of bourgeois Western Catholicism. The challenge goes far deeper than asking, for instance, whether there are circumstances where divorced and remarried Catholics may receive Holy Communion. It calls into question the whole idea of sin as something purely private and personal, and makes it largely social and political.

In a neglected section of Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis redefines one of the most familiar principles of everyday Catholic life: that Catholics who unworthily eat and drink the Body and Blood of Our Lord “eat and drink judgement on themselves”. It comes from St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, 11: 17-34: “Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord.”