"Have you read Amoris Laetitia?” has quickly become the Catholic equivalent of “Have you read War and Peace?” At 60,000 words, the apostolic exhortation on the family is one of the longest papal documents in history. It takes a good four hours to read – and many more to digest. But don’t be intimated by the text’s length: this a readable, wry and engaging work that is likely to inspire you regardless of your state in life. Pope Francis offers helpful, down-to-earth advice for everyone from anxious fiancés to bickering couples, from overbearing mothers-in-law to perplexed parish priests. In Amoris Laetitia, you will come face to face with a deeply experienced pastor who sympathises with your daily struggle to live an authentically Christian life. Most commentators have understandably zeroed in on the text’s most contentious section: chapter eight, in which the Pope addresses the most divisive issue at the two family synods, the possibility of some remarried Catholics receiving Holy Communion. “Everyone should feel challenged by chapter eight,” Francis says laconically at the start of Amoris Laetitia. Quite so, for here he seeks to explain how people in “exceptional situations” can be reintegrated into parish life, while declining to present “a new set of general rules, canonical nature and applicable to all”. No one should doubt Francis’s good intentions regarding the remarried. He notes that the worldwide consultation that preceded the family synods found that “most people in difficult or critical situations do not seek pastoral assistance since they do not find it sympathetic, realistic or concerned for individual cases”. The Church is therefore failing to care for some of our most grievously wounded brothers and sisters. Amoris Laetitia is Francis’s effort to remedy this failure. Even good intentions can, of course, have unintended consequences. Is it possible, as a writer for the New Yorker suggested (approvingly), that after Amoris Laetitia “the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage, however much it is still held up as an ideal, will not grip the moral imagination of the Church as it once did”? Time will tell, but Francis evidently thinks this is a risk worth taking to ensure that those in greatest need do not “feel judged and abandoned by the very Mother called to show them God’s mercy”. Francis’s emphasis on decentralisation may also have unforeseen consequences. Clearly, he is not seeking to decentralise Church teaching, but rather to make room for what he calls “new forms of missionary creativity”. But some may nevertheless interpret Amoris Laetitia as papal permission to engage in the kind of reckless experimentation that destabilised the Church in the 1970s. But if these dangers are borne in mind, and strenuously avoided, this document should bear much fruit. The Pope is right when he says that “nowadays, pastoral care for families has to be fundamentally missionary, going out to where people are”. Two years of fractious and exhausting debate are over: let the mission begin.