Pope Francis is warm-hearted but that doesn't mean he's a liberal too

However, the way the event was covered by most media would give you the impression that he had changed the church's teaching, or was about to do so.

The manner in which the 'Daily Telegraph's' Nick Squires reported the story was typical.

He wrote: "Couples who have been 'living in sin' and women who had children out of wedlock will be married by Pope Francis at a ceremony at the Vatican on Sunday, in a further sign of his determination to make the Catholic Church more inclusive and compassionate."

In a similar vein, the BBC reported, "Very slowly, the church under the guidance of Pope Francis is facing the fact that many Catholic couples cohabit before marriage, use contraception freely and divorce and remarry without seeking an annulment."

An article at IrishCentral.com went completely over the top. It said: "In marrying them (the cohabiting couples) he (Francis) kicked away one of the bulwark beliefs of the sex-obsessed hierarchy in the old church, the belief that sex outside marriage was a heinous and immoral act."

In fact, the Pope didn't do anything very remarkable at all. Every day all over the world, priests preside at marriages of couples who had been living together first.

I wonder if there is a single priest or bishop anywhere, even the most conservative ones, who have refused to marry a cohabiting couple because they were cohabiting? I doubt it, because there would be no moral or theological reason for them to do so and every reason for them to be delighted to marry them.

From the church's point of view, marrying a cohabiting couple regularises their union. In marrying the couples who had cohabited, Pope Francis would have been doing exactly the same thing.

The last pope to preside over the wedding of a group of couples like this was St John Paul II in 2000. Had any of them cohabited first? I don't know. I bet some had, but journalists at the time probably didn't care to find out because it was impossible to spin John Paul as a liberal, whereas they love spinning Francis as one.

Francis definitely has adopted a softer tone than his two immediate predecessors. Or maybe it is that John Paul and Benedict were simply clearer in their utterances, leaving little or no room for ambiguity.

But Francis is trying to walk a line between mercy and maintaining at the same time the moral standards the church teaches and this can sometimes make it seem like he is compromising those standards. The media exploit the resultant ambiguity for maximum effect.

In fact, if you look at what Pope Francis has to say about marriage, he is absolutely orthodox.

So on Sunday when he was speaking to those couples, he spoke about marriage in thoroughly traditional terms. He said marriage is a "man and woman walking together, wherein the husband helps his wife to become ever more a woman, and wherein the woman has the task of helping her husband to become ever more a man.

"Here we see the reciprocity of differences."

He has emphasised again and again that marriage is built on the differences between the sexes.

On another occasion, he criticised married couples who intend never to have children, but he did so in his usual home-spun way.

He said, the "culture of well-being convinced us 10 years ago: 'It's better not to have children! It's better! So you can go out and get to know the world, you can go on vacation, have a villa in the countryside, and be at peace'… Maybe it's better, more comfortable, to have a dog, a couple of cats, and the love goes to those two cats and the dog. Now, is this true or not? Have you seen this? Then, in the end, this married couple reaches old age in solitude, with the bitterness of bitter loneliness."

Pope Francis almost always speaks in this kind of familiar language. The mistake is to think you can't speak in a warm-hearted, down-to-earth-way and be true to the teachings and thinking of the church at the same time. Journalists are showing their own prejudices by believing the Pope's warm-heartedness means he must be as liberal as they are.