At the heart of the opposition to Amoris Laetitia is the fear that, in opening the door to the readmission of divorced and remarried Catholics to Holy Communion in some circumstances, the Pope is changing traditional Church teaching.

I don’t think that, strictly speaking, this does amount to a development of doctrine. Rather, it is a case, as an editorial in The Tablet put it last year, of “Church teaching” that “has not changed even if the rules have”. In other words, the doctrinal essentials are understood to be non-negotiable, but they must be applied according to many concrete and varied factors. Consequently, the applications are not endowed with an entirely universal value.