Ten years after Pope Francis published “Amoris Laetitia,” his exhortation on “Love in the Family,” Pope Leo XIV opened the weeklong meeting of the presidents of the world’s 115 Catholic bishops’ conferences and the heads of the Eastern rite Catholic churches by telling them, “I ask the Lord to help us gather together the fruits that ‘Amoris Laetitia’ has borne in our local churches, so that they may nourish the whole church.” He emphasized the need to pay special attention to fragility and “recognize the work of grace even in situations marked by limits, wounds and apparent failure.”
The meeting, moderated by Cardinal Mario Grech, the secretary general of the synod, began with a prayer and a welcome address to the pope by Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life. Cardinal Farrell recalled that Pope Leo, in his message on March 19, said that two apostolic exhortations on the family, St. John Paul II’s “Familiaris Consortio” and Pope Francis’ “Amoris Laetitia,” “have both strengthened the church’s doctrinal and pastoral commitment to the service of young people, married couples and families.”
In his speech, Pope Leo recalled that over the past decade Pope Francis’ magisterial exhortation “has been received in different cultures and pastoral contexts, accompanied the concrete lives of families and inspired initiatives and processes.” He told those present: “With the guidance of the Holy Spirit, looking attentively at what has happened can help us recognize more deeply what Christ has been teaching his church through these years.”
The 187 participants, including 22 lay people, mostly couples, sat at 16 round tables in the Paul VI Audience Hall, as participants did at the Synod on Synodality, and were joined by 26 experts and 16 facilitators. Leo told them that “The Acts of the Apostles offer us a beautiful image for what we are about to do.” At the end of their missionary journey, Leo recalled, Paul and Barnabas gathered the church together in Jerusalem and in other places “and related all that God has done with them” (Acts 14).
Leo noted that “the church has spent these 10 years receiving ‘Amoris Laetitia’ and walking with families in very different circumstances.” At this meeting, he said, “We, too, bring stories of what God has done among us. They are stories gathered along the path of mission: stories of conversion, of unexpected fruit and of the relationships God has woven within families as our communities have sought to accompany them, together with the difficulties we have faced, the questions that have emerged, and what we have learned along the way.”
The dignity of the family
Earlier in his speech, he recalled that the family has always had an important place in the concern of the popes and bishops, especially since the Second Vatican Council. That council, he said, highlighted “the dignity of marriage and the family” in “Gaudium et Spes” (“The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World”) and “recognized that family life offers a privileged point of entry into the great cultural, economic, social and political questions of our time, including the work of promoting peace among peoples.”
Today, the pope said, “the family remains key to an approach that holds together the local and the global, guided by the search for a universal fraternity in Christ that the Gospel calls us to build with everyone.”
He recalled that following Vatican II, Pope John Paul II convened a synod on the family in 1980 and published the apostolic exhortation, “Familiaris Consortio.” Thirty-five years later, Pope Francis also called a synod on the family (2014 and 2015), “recognizing the need to continue the church’s discernment in the face of profound changes affecting an area so closely linked to her mission in the world today.”
He repeated what he said in his March 19 message on the 10th anniversary of “Amoris Laetitia,” that “there are, in fact, places and circumstances in which the church ‘can become the salt of the earth’ only through the lay faithful and, in particular, through families.” Today he added, “‘Amoris Laetitia’ invites us to take seriously this vocation and responsibility. Families themselves participate in the church’s mission in the ordinary fabric of their lives, through love and fidelity, care and forgiveness, the education of children, their efforts in transmitting faith, attention to the elderly and the vulnerable, and the many ways in which they serve their communities and society.”
He told the bishops present, “As pastors, we have received the responsibility, in season and out of season, of proclaiming the beauty of God’s plan for marriage and the family and his call for love and tenderness” and “this challenges us to accompany people as they seek to live their vocation in the concrete circumstances of their lives.”
This ministry calls for listening, he said. He emphasized that “[t]he wisdom of the People of God reaches us through our common faith, which enlightens all families, including situations marked by difficulties, loneliness and at times even apparent failure. The Lord himself patiently teaches us when we take the time to listen, and we certainly have much to learn from families,” and “their lives also place before us questions that deserve to be faced with courage.”
He made clear that participants were to look at the new reality of today’s world, including, as Cardinal Farrell said in his welcome address, the “rapid cultural and social transformations which have profoundly shaped the reality of the family over the past 10 years.”
Pope Leo noted that today “in many contexts, a growing distance has emerged between the ways in which sex and intimacy are lived and the Christian vision of marriage. Young people continue to long for love, fidelity and belonging, yet many find it difficult to embrace how such a vision of love can take shape in their own lives or to believe that a lifelong commitment is the condition for reaching what they desire. Economic insecurity, migration, violence, loneliness and other forms of emotional fragility also shape the choices people make and the possibilities they can imagine for their future.”
“These realities raise a number of questions that we must face with courage,” he said. Leo then suggested what some of these questions might be:
What are people truly seeking beneath these cultural changes? What do their joys and hopes, griefs and anxieties reveal to us? Where do our pastoral language and practices succeed in opening a path, and where do they fail to touch people’s hearts or assist their efforts to do what is good? What is the lived experience of families teaching us—an experience from which we have not yet fully learned? What can we offer as formation for healthy and holy family life? In particular, what can we learn from parents as they seek to accompany their children and young people in such contexts?
The experience of fragility
In a significant passage reminiscent of Pope Francis’ approach to this subject, Leo emphasized that at this meeting, “fragility deserves special attention, for it can profoundly shape the way people see themselves, their future and even their relationship with God and with the church.” He said, “The experience of fragility raises the question of whether we are able to remain close to one another when life no longer corresponds to what had been hoped for.”
“In this respect, too,” he said, “the experience of families has something to teach everyone, since fragility belongs to our common human condition and therefore also to the life of the church. We all know the gap between the good we desire and what we are able to live. We need grace, forgiveness and new beginnings to accomplish God’s will, and we learn that fidelity is itself a grace to be received and a path to be gradually renewed, often through trial.”
“Recognizing this shared challenge should shape the way we accompany one another in the church,” Leo said. He made it clear that it raised such important questions as: “What kind of church, then, do people encounter precisely when they are most fragile? Do our communities help them discover that they still have a place, a responsibility and gifts to offer? Can the truth we proclaim be encountered through the patience, closeness and mercy of our pastoral presence? How can we announce to them the fullness of the Gospel’s teaching about the family?”
He called on the participants “to give such questions their full weight” and reminded them, “The Holy Spirit often speaks through the very situations that challenge us, and enlightens us that we may discover how God’s mercy and the salvific grace of Christ can reach our families today, particularly in their weakness and resilience, in their hopes and disappointments, in their longing for communion and their search for meaning.”
He insisted that “our task is not only to interpret these realities but to let them question us and motivate our pastoral responsibility, so that the church may find renewed ways of proclaiming the Gospel, offering sacramental graces, accompanying families and making visible the tenderness with which Christ continues to walk among his people.”
At the 2014 and 2015 sessions of the synod on the family, Pope Francis had called on participants to speak with boldness and freedom; today, Pope Leo struck a similar note when he told those present, “May our dialogue with one another be marked by the evangelical freedom we see in the Acts of the Apostles.”
Leo said the themes chosen for this meeting are “meant to keep the breadth of ‘Amoris Laetitia’ before us and to bring the apostolic exhortation into conversation with what our churches have experienced during these past 10 years.” He reminded them that “listening to one another, allowing what we hear to resonate within us and remaining attentive to the promptings of the Holy Spirit can awaken the pastoral creativity we need in the face of new questions.”
He expressed the hope that, “through the many stories you bring from your churches and from different cultural contexts, a shared narrative of these 10 years may gradually take shape, one marked by joy and hope, and that will enable us to face honestly the trials and difficulties that remain.”
Pope Leo asked participants of the closed-door meeting to “preserve the discretion and confidentiality that this time of listening and discernment requires.”
He concluded his speech with this prayer: “May the Lord give us the freedom to listen to one another, the wisdom to recognize his work among his people, and the courage to follow where he leads us, so that, each day, the Gospel may become ever more fully good news for families throughout the world.”
Participants applauded Leo’s speech warmly, and then listened to a meditation given by Helen Alford, O.P., the president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. That meditation was followed by a long period of silence.
The meeting will use the “conversations in the Spirit” methodology used at the synod on synodality. Each session will begin with a talk by a bishop and an expert, followed by conversation in the groups, with feedback to the plenary assembly. A synthesis report will be released at the end. The meeting will conclude on Oct. 14 with a Mass presided over by Pope Leo in St. Peter’s Square.
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