The Pope’s recent apostolic exhortation emphasises the need for the Church to be sensitive in the way it applies its teaching on marriage and relationships. A moral theologian finds precedents for this approach in diverse areas – from money lending to homosexuality in animals

No sooner has Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, appeared than there is an eagerness to claim that it does – or does not – involve a change in church teaching. While more conservative readers do not wish the current teaching to be changed at all, others think it is high time that it was.

I think it would be helpful to make this debate more precise, and to ask whether the document represents a complete change of teaching or, rather more modestly, whether it suggests that existing teaching might be more closely inspected and more considerately invoked in practice without being definitively changed.

A useful parallel is to be found in the practice of civil law: there is a major difference between the way in which our law develops because courts decide how an existing law should be interpreted to deal justly with a particular case, and an alternative process where a law is simply repealed. So, in Britain, what counts as “driving without due care and attention” now might include using a mobile phone, given the effects of such use on a person’s driving, even though those words are not included in the text of the law itself.