The Indian cardinal Filipe Neri Ferrão spoke about the family in Asia, particularly in India, when he addressed participants at the “Amoris Laetitia” meeting on Thursday, Oct. 8, as they began to focus on the first of the five major themes of this gathering: “Families today: reality, beauty and challenges.”

Each day of the meeting has a specific theme, and before breaking into the 16 working groups, participants pray and then listen to presentations from a family, a bishop and an expert. I have chosen to highlight in today’s report the input given by Cardinal Neri, 63. He is the president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India and the president of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences. He is able to give a broad overview of the situation in a continent where half of humanity lives, where there are many different religions and cultures, and where Christians account for 8 percent, and Catholics, a mere 3.3 percent, of Asia’s 4.8 billion population.

“In our local churches,” he said, “we recognize the family as a privileged locus of revelation: It is there that life is received, relationships are formed, Gospel values are transmitted and faith is lived through unique and personal histories.” And yet today, “when we make listening a pastoral attitude, we discover that the realities, beauty and challenges of our families converge to reveal the presence and action of God in a most mysterious way.”

In India and, more broadly, across Asia, he said, “the family remains the bedrock of society and the foundational cell of the domestic church,” but “the families we accompany also reveal to us that family life is undergoing profound and radical transitions.”

He listed three “particularly significant” changes in relation to the family in India and across Asia. First, “the shift in the identity, nature and composition of the family.” He said that “traditional joint and extended families are increasingly giving way to smaller, nuclear households; new forms of partnership and cohabitation are emerging, amid changing understandings of gender and relationships in urban settings; and the growing reality of interfaith marriages in our multi-religious societies raises new questions about the practice and transmission of faith within the family.”

Second, “the shift from rootedness to mobility.” He explained that “rapid urbanization, economic growth, new development models and greater access to education are prompting more people to move, both within their countries and across borders, in search of better opportunities.” As a result of this, he said, “many families entrusted to our pastoral care are no longer households connected to a single parish.”

Third, “the shift in [the] existential condition of families.” He noted that India and Asia “share a common paradox: Growth is rapid but unequal; opportunities are expanding but access to them remains discriminatory.” Moreover, he said: “The dignity of life, the value of labor and the protection of rights are not experienced equally by all. Economic insecurity, poverty, unemployment and uncertainty about the future weigh heavily on many families.” In addition to all this, “Christian families in many parts of India and Asia must also live amid growing religious polarization and hostility, making the public expression and transmission of faith increasingly difficult.”

Notwithstanding all this, Cardinal Neri said the Christian families of India and Asia reveal three kinds of beauty. First, “the beauty of relationship.” He said: “This is particularly seen in the care offered to children, the elderly, the infirm and the vulnerable. In such tender acts, our families lend visibility to God’s love shining through self-sacrifice, sustained by patience and sealed with fidelity.”

Second, “the beauty of resilience and hope.” He said this is shown when, “even amid poverty, migration and uncertainty, our families continue to create positive spaces for joy and hope.”

Third, “the beauty of dialogue.” This is seen, he said, “amid Asia’s immense religious and cultural diversity, families constantly encounter new avenues, new horizons, and new experiences of dialogue.”

Cardinal Neri then spoke of what happened in India and across Asia when they received “Amoris Laetitia” 10 years ago. Their churches “listened first to families,” he said, and “that listening shaped how we walk with them.” As a result, he said, “we now see marriage preparation as the start of a lifelong journey, offer spiritual renewal and counseling to couples and children, and keep forming families and lay leaders over time.” 

They also learned that “pastoral work is itself a place of discernment,” he said. “We don’t arrive with ready-made answers. We discern together with families and, in doing so, we learn how the church herself is being asked to change.” 

As a result of this, Cardinal Neri said the church understood that it is called to “be counter-cultural without losing touch,” “to offer an alternative to whatever dehumanizes, excludes or fragments” and to respond creatively to the call of “Magnifica Humanitas,” Pope Leo’s encyclical on human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence. “We must move from mission to families to mission among families” because “we can’t guide people by standing far off and pointing at the destination. We need to be a lighthouse and a streetlight: one shows the horizon, the other lights the next step and walks alongside.”

Furthermore, he said, the churches across Asia learned that “fragility is not the absence of grace. If we listen well, we hear wisdom and faithfulness alongside pain. So, we ask not what families are missing, but what God is already doing in their midst.” His words were closely aligned with what Pope Leo said in his opening speech to the assembly yesterday when he called on participants to give “special attention” to “fragility.”

Cardinal Neri concluded by saying that 10 years after “Amoris Laetitia” and the synod on the family, the church sees that “there is no single stereotype of an ideal family but rather a challenging mosaic of diverse realities, marked by joys, hopes, struggles and wounds. The family is not only a place to which the church brings the Gospel. It is also a place from which the Gospel comes alive—from one generation to another, from one family to another, and from families to society.”

In this context, he said, “Perhaps the question we might carry into our synodal discernment is this: What is the Holy Spirit asking the church to change—not only in what we do for the families, but in how we understand, accompany and empower them as protagonists of the Gospel and as enduring loci of God’s revelation?”

Gerard O’Connell is America’s senior Vatican correspondent and author of The Election of Pope Francis: An Inside Story of the Conclave That Changed History. He has been covering the Vatican since 1985.