One of the symptoms indicating the unprecedented severity of the current ecclesial crisis is the astounding level of prolixity in Church documents as compared with the declarative simplicity of pre-Vatican II Church teaching. Even the very longest pre-conciliar encyclicals (e.g. Pius XII’s Mystici corporis or Saint Pius X’s Pascendi) run to about 20,000 words, including extensive footnotes, and their texts are models of clarity and precision. Today, however, we are routinely burdened with book-length manifestos such as Laudato si’, Evangelii Gaudium and, of course, Amoris Laetitia, which are more than twice as long but say little or nothing about the...