Last week, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput released “Pastoral Guidelines for Implementing Amoris Laetitia,” regarding Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation issued
in April. That profound and complex 263-page document affirmed “a
renewed awareness of the importance of marriage and the family” at the
same time that it interrogated definitions of family, pastoral
obligations and current practices. It chastised the Catholic Church for
being too cold, too bureaucratic in its dealings with parishioners whose
family structures or situations were not the accepted norm, and
extolled sexuality rooted in pleasure, and unburdened by guilt.
