So our topic this morning is accompaniment in the modern magisterium, and let's begin at the end of the story, and then we'll work our way back to the beginning.

In the latter chapters of Amoros Letitia, after having provided a thorough and at times lyrical description of marriage,

Pope Francis turns his attention to the challenges to marriage faced by

individuals and couples today. He addresses with a pastor's heart those individuals in de facto

unions, which including cohabitation function as a type of substitute for marriage. The Pope addresses also those Catholics in irregular situations,

namely the divorced and civilly remarried.

To these persons, the Pope offers a special word of encouragement.

The Church has consistently considered second marriages of such individuals,

adulterous, and thus a cause

for the individual's exclusion as long as they persist in adulterous activity from full participation

in the church of sacramental life. But Francis says nothing to second guess this judgment,

obedient as it is to the explicit teaching

of Jesus. But he laments the fact that for many individuals in non-sacramental marriages,

their exclusion from the church's sacramental life has become a de facto exclusion from the

whole of the church's life.

Like Pope John Paul II before him, Pope Francis encourages the divorced and remarried to resume their rightful place in the Christian community, even while a return to

full sacramental communion may as yet remain impossible.

With the resumption of an active ecclesial life in view, the Holy Father dedicates

Chapter 8 of Amoris Letitia to outlining a way in which pastors can accompany the divorced

and remarried on a path of discernment to reintegrate them into the church's life.

The Pope draws both the language and the method of this accompaniment from his Jesuit tradition,

which regards discernment as a means of perceiving one's subjective state through an objective and divine lens.

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