The acting head teacher of a Catholic school in Gosport, Hampshire, has been told he is disqualified from applying for the full headship post simply by virtue of the “irregular” status of his marriage. Because he is divorced and remarried he cannot be “a practising Catholic”. Yet nobody reading the text of Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation on family life issued earlier this year, could honestly imagine that this is the sort of thing he had in mind. Except to condemn it.

In paragraph 298, Pope Francis declares: “The divorced who have entered a new union  ... can find themselves in a variety of situations, which should not be pigeonholed or put into overly rigid classifications leaving no room for a suitable personal and pastoral discernment.” In paragraph 305, he adds: “A pastor cannot feel that it is enough simply to apply moral laws to those living in ‘irregular’ situations, as if they were stones to throw at people’s lives.