The Pope’s latest exhortation is often refreshing in style and content. It will heal some wounds in the Church, but leave others, particularly those of gay people, to fester

I don’t have high expectations for church documents on the family. Abstract, saccharine, theoretical, idealised; they usually seem to describe a world I don’t know at all. And I have to confess I can’t remember ever hearing a sermon on family life, or family relations, that I actually found helpful. Against this background, large parts of Amoris Laetitia – not all of it, but large parts – are wonderfully refreshing.

It has a number of features that are becoming familiar from Pope Francis: it is rather too long; it repeatedly cites documents from conferences of bishops; it draws on some unexpected sources (the longest quotation is from Martin Luther King); it picks up on themes of the dangers of consumerism and a “throwaway culture”, and emphasises joy and tenderness and the need to express the core of the Church’s vision in positive and compelling ways (rather than focus on drawing lines and on moralising); it shows an ongoing concern for issues of refugees and migration, for the plight of the poor, for environmental destruction.