"Clothes are everything" sounds like some exhortation to spend, as issued through the pages of a glossy magazine.
This month the Catholic bishops issued an "exhortation" in which they warned that the "implantation of a socialist state...implies the end of pluralism and political freedom".
Astonishingly, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, publicly attacked the Egyptians and issued an exhortation to the Egyptian Army to overthrow the Mubarak regime.
Last month, speaking about criminal-justice reform, President Obama issued twin exhortations.
Although he issued regular exhortations demanding restraint from Mr. Abbas, the struggling new Palestinian prime minister, and from Mr. Sharon, the prime minister of Israel, he did not make a single call to the region, even after Mr. Sharon's forces tried to assassinate a leader of the Islamic militant group Hamas and a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 16 on a bus in Jerusalem.
We have seen the same pattern of pretty speeches followed by empty exhortations on issue after issue.
In April Francis issued his second exhortation, Amoris laetitia ("The Joy of Love"), a wide-ranging pronouncement on family issues.
In responding to a series of strikes by state workers, journalists and the police on Monday, the council issued a forceful exhortation that some read as a veiled threat, although it did not threaten specific penalties.
A papal exhortation is an official statement issued by the Vatican that ranks below formal encyclicals, which are used to state the Church's position on things like abortion and contraception, but above a regular letter to the faithful.
He has used couriers to carry private instructions and issued public statements that contained threats and exhortations.
