Nothing changed, but the Church cannot refuse communion to a churchgoer.

It is still a grievous sin if the communicant is not in a state of grace.

And being separated and living with someone else, is not exactly living according to the laws of the church.

No formal change has happened, Daphne.

Committing adultery goes against one of the Ten Commandments. It is one of the gravest sins in the Roman Catholic Church’s rulebook and people who commit it are not allowed to receive the Eucharist.

That said, the chasm between the rulebook and reality on the ground is widening.

First of all, unlike in the past, it is difficult for priests to keep track of their congregation. Parishes are large and people are not confined to their villages any more. Many priests simply have no idea who is doing what and living with who. When adulterers feel that they are not welcome in their own village’s church, they go to mass somewhere else.

Policing everybody is hard so priests leave it up to the people receiving the Eucharist to make sure that they are worthy of doing so.

Secondly, the constant discussion in the media about when the Roman Catholic Church will ‘accept everybody’ means that many priests are feeling pressured to become ‘liberal’, ‘progressive’ and ‘modern’ (whatever any of those terms mean). Priests are afraid that making a scene about not agreeing to administer sacraments to Mr or Mrs X because of his or her personal lifestyle comes across as old-fashioned.

Consequently, many priests would rather ‘let God be the judge’. This kind of thinking is fuelled by the ‘mixed messages’ sometimes given by the pope and the Curia (straddling the line between sounding welcoming while sticking to the rules) as well as young, hip priests who present their own chat shows on television, read mass in the most informal of ways, have large congregations (more like a cult following) of young people and come across as a bit rebellious.

Ultimately, priests in 2015 are usually happy just to see their pews full, irrespective of who is sitting in them. One can either be cynical about this and say that they are selling out or one can be understanding and say that they are doing their best to get the Lord’s message across.

Presumably, though, it is still harder for adulterers to get into the Kingdom of God than it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.

He’s not exactly an Adonis.

Well, Putin managed to go from high-ranking security officer for one of the most aggressively atheistic regimes in recent history to ‘defender’ of the Christian faith in Russia. Quite in good company, our socialists.

Socialist hypocrites.