I glanced through online and listened live to it and I'm not entirely sure why the pros are so het up about it.

The Bishops' Lenten Pastoral Letter, I mean, and the pros are the pro-divorce commenters who came alive online when the news item about the Letter was carried.

I mean, precisely what did the pro-divorce lobby expect the Church to do, come over all liberal-like and say that divorce was a good thing? It is the Church's position that divorce is not in accordance with God's law and as such anyone who partakes of it will be committing a sin. It is the Church's right to preach this position and to communicate it to all and sundry.

It is not the Church's right to interfere directly in the debate insofar as it concerns civil rights and obligations, and unless I missed it completely, the Church did not seek to do this. There wasn't any form of direction to the faithful as to how they should vote on Champions' League Final day (let me make it clear, I will be voting 'yes', unless Chelsea get through and I get a ticket, both unlikely events) - if there had been I would have been the first to get worked up.

As it is, the Letter was anodyne and the pros should measure their words before starting to scream and shout and run about.

On the other hand, the Letter was pretty pointless, constituting as it did something of a statement of the obvious ("marriage is good" "family is good" ... duh) to say nothing of the moderately strange exhortation, towards the end, for spouses to work on their marriage by, amongst other things, keeping a photo of the other spouse at the workplace, presumably in order to remember to whom it is one is spliced.