text: I feel a kind of emptiness about how the debate over AL finished. I do feel that AL had many wonderful things to say - the idea of accompaniment being one, meeting people not where you might want them to be but where they are.  It felt like there was a debate that needed to happen in our Church and that there were unsolved questions that needed to be answered or at least voiced. In the final analysis, this was about power. Cardinal Burke has less of it than Pope Francis, so Pope Francis won. That's not really a solution.