Since, judging by the article by Austin Bencini (A Think-Tank's Anathema, August 13), he has clearly based his reactions to my response to the ProgettImpenn report, commenting on mine as lead author of For Worse, For Better: Re-marriage After Legal Separation, solely on the newspaper reports, I am taking this opportunity of sending him a personal copy of the response in full for him to study.

In it he will discover that, far from "throwing an anathema against a Church", as he colourfully puts it, my response focuses on three issues: exposing the fundamental flaw in the ProgettImpenn arguments (where it asserts, illogically, that "divorce causes marriage breakdown" when marriage breakdown clearly happens well before legal separation or divorce comes into effect and is not caused by them); setting out the detailed statistical evidence to refute ProgettImpenn's efforts to, in its own words, "prove the reality is not as bad as presented by TPPI" (it was in this context that the word 'denial' was rightly used); and exposing the hypocrisy running through its position.

He will discover also that I refer several times to the respect I hold for the Church's doctrinal view (which I recognise is its religious and honestly held view-point), but that I objected to ProgettImpenn's attempt to dress up its report as an objective and reasonable secular case to prevent re-marriage after legal separation, when it was clearly being selective and self-serving in the arguments it deployed.

Therein lies the heart of the debate between us and "anathema" has nothing to do with it.