Today’s session of the meeting on Pope Francis’ 2016 document “Amoris Laetitia” currently underway at the Vatican focused on the church’s work accompanying and supporting families “in the difficulties of life” and included discussions of divorced and remarried Catholics, among other forms of “human fragility,” according to meeting participants.
Ten years ago, “Amoris Laetitia” opened the possibility of allowing Catholics who are divorced and who civilly remarried without an annulment to return to the sacraments, despite longstanding Catholic teaching barring them from receiving Communion. The opening in “Amoris” required these Catholics to discern with a priest whether they might be called to return to Communion; however, the vision laid out in the document has been applied unevenly. It is expected to be discussed in the current closed-door meeting of the heads of the world’s bishops’ conferences.
Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told America after the morning session that the issue had not been discussed at his table—one of 16 small discussion groups sorted by language—but “could be coming later,” for example in the day’s afternoon session.
Cardinal Joseph Tobin, who is attending the meeting as a personal invitee of Pope Leo, said that communion for the divorced and remarried was “one of the ways that the fragility of families is being approached” in the meetings.
“We talked about concrete [realities],” the cardinal told America. “The church always needs to move. Francis always talked about the iglesia in salida, the church that goes out of itself, and you’re not going to hear it if you stay where we are.” Asked if the church had “moved” since “Amoris Laetitia,” Cardinal Tobin said, “I think it has in some places; in others, not so much.”
Due to Pope Leo XIV’s impending hospitalization—he is expected to be admitted to the hospital late tomorrow morning to have a nodule removed from his lung—the synthesis document summarizing the meeting’s discussions will not be published as had previously been planned.
According to a joint statement from Cardinals Kevin Farrell and Mario Grech, who lead the Vatican offices that planned the meeting, the pope will review the texts of interventions made at the meeting, reports from the 16 discussion groups and the final synthesis report after he “has completed his convalescence.”
“We will then proceed according to his instructions,” the cardinals wrote.
The broader discussion: Fragility in families
Setting up this morning’s conversation at the meeting, Cardinal Kevin Farrell, prefect for the Vatican’s Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, reminded participants, “In the face of the fragility experienced by families, ‘Amoris Laetitia’ invited us to give priority to listening, to avoid judging too quickly, and to allow ourselves to be surprised by the action of God’s grace in people’s lives.”
Cardinal Farrell invited the bishops and the 22 lay participants present to “speak truthfully” and listen to stories of the “complexity of family life—a complexity that may reveal human frailty, personal sin or the consequences of the sins of others,” all while “avoiding any spirit of controversy.”
As on other days, the participants then heard from a family whose testimony and identities were kept anonymous. They also listened to expert testimonies from lay theologian Julie Hanlon Rubio, the Shea-Huesman Professor of Christian Social Ethics at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University in Berkeley, Calif., and Cardinal Pablo Virgilio “Ambo” David, the bishop of Kalookan in the Philippines who is known for standing up to former Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte’s excesses in his “war on drugs.”
Cardinal David showed an illustrated video version of his speech, which included stories of how the church accompanied local families whose fathers or brothers had been killed by the Duterte regime, and the lessons the local church had gained from that ministry.
“They taught us to listen before speaking and to recognize Christ already present among the poor. They taught us that evangelization is not simply bringing God to people, as though God were absent from their lives. Often, we discover that God has arrived there ahead of us,” the cardinal said. “A fragile family needs more than pastoral advice, It needs a community that can help carry what it can no longer carry alone.”
Archbishop Coakley, speaking to America, said that at his table this morning, many kinds of “human fragility” had been discussed, “from grief and bereavement to financial insecurity to divorce and abandonment and all sorts of things.”
Dr. Rubio told the group, “Today new forms of fragility require both re-engagement with [“Amoris Laetitia”’s] vision of marriage and a broader praxis of accompaniment.”
Alluding to declining marriage rates in many parts of the world, she warned, “If current trends continue, more people will miss out—on the depth of intimacy with a spouse, on the sacrifices and joys of parenting, on creating an open home, on the grace of growing old with a partner in life and love. Others will miss out on the gifts that married households bring.”
Dr. Rubio analyzed surveys on why young people were or were not seeking marriage and found that many cited love as the primary motivation for wanting to get married, while many also felt unworthy or unready. She argued that “this fragility can be embraced as core to our humanity. Marriage and family are essential ecosystems for holding it.”
She praised Francis’ “integration of weakness,” particularly “in an era when influencers on social media show off their seemingly perfect ‘traditional’ families complete with homemade bread and chickens.”
“Amoris Laetitia,” she said, offered families, “especially those who felt excluded…a compelling vision and concrete support. Ten years later, a deeper crisis marks marriage and parenting, as fewer people choose them.”
Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics
Dr. Rubio argued that “the problem of the problem of marginalization that concerned Pope Francis has been solved” and recounted the story of an elderly woman “suffering from dementia who, when offered Eucharist at Mass, shouted, ‘No!,’ and covered her mouth, because one thing she remembered was that, because her husband of 50 years had been previously married, she was not worthy to receive the Body of Christ.”
She concluded, “The church can offer a challenging vision of marriage as intimate partnership oriented to love and justice that does not require perfection.”
In their small groups, the bishops are primarily discussing the experiences of Catholics in their local areas. One interesting case study for how “Amoris Laetitia”’s opening of Communion to the divorced and remarried has been applied is in Czechia, where a meeting was held just after the document’s release to discuss a path for remarried Catholics to return to the sacraments. The bishops were ultimately unable to come to an agreement, and Bishop Tomáš Holub of Plzeň created a system for his diocese in which divorced couples would work with a Missionary of Mercy—a priest specially appointed by Pope Francis—to discern a possible return to the sacraments.
Speaking to America this afternoon, Bishop Josef Nuzík of Olomouc, Czechia, explained that “in the Czech Republic, not all the bishops agree about the situation or about how to move forward.” Cardinal Dominik Duka, the former archbishop of Prague, submitted an official dubia, or list of doubts, to the Vatican in 2023 asking whether couples who were remarried had to abstain from sex in order to return to the sacraments. The Vatican responded that they did not.
Bishop Nuzík said that another path besides the Plzeň plan (the one involving Missionaries of Mercy) had also been opened in Czechia, in which a bishop is meeting with couples and later involves a priest to help with the discernment.
Ten years later: The unfinished implementation of “Amoris Laetitia”
While the document itself and its implementation have been hotly debated, particularly in the years immediately following the apostolic exhortation, Cardinal Tobin said today that he had not heard in the meeting from anyone who wanted to see a return to pre-“Amoris Laetitia” practice, explaining that the document was definitively part of the church’s magisterium.
Father Giacomo Costa, S.J., who is in charge of the methodology for the meeting and has been giving regular updates to the press, said today that there is still much work to be done to implement “Amoris Laetitia.”
“The review of these years allows us to recognize both the fruits and the difficulties,” Father Costa said at a press briefing today. “Some insights have been confirmed, while others still await implementation as ordinary and shared practices. The next steps are gradually becoming clearer.”
Clarifying those next steps to “continue along the path of mercy opened by Pope Francis” is a key task of the meeting, as Cardinal Farrell reminded participants today.
Father Costa said that one area in which implementing the vision of “Amoris Laetitia” remains unfinished, and which was discussed in the meeting in recent days, was the fact that many couples are living together without being married, for a variety of reasons.
He said, “Many, very many [meeting] participants, insisted on the importance of meeting these couples and individuals where they are, as they are, listening to their stories and recognizing what they are seeking and building,” as some are seeking more stable relationships than others, some are living together due to financial or family reasons, and so on. The term cohabitation refers to “very different realities that cannot all be viewed in the same way,” he said.
“The primary question is not whether or not people are cohabiting. It is whether they are truly capable of freely consenting to what the church understands marriage to be: a public, faithful, indissoluble covenant, open to life,” he concluded.
Cardinal David, in his video speech, echoed this emphasis on getting to know individuals’ circumstances rather than condemning them.
“This is why ‘Amoris Laetitia’ has been so important for us,” he said. “It does not ask us to abandon the ideal. It asks us to accompany real people in the often painful distance between the ideal and their actual situation.”
“The church cannot always wait for people to come to her,” the cardinal said. “Sometimes she has to go where people live, where they struggle, where they grieve, where they hope—and discover that Christ is already there, waiting for us.”
Another frequent topic, according to participants, has been strengthening marriage preparation and support for couples and families after marriage.
Bishop Nuzík explained during this afternoon’s press conference that in Czechia, every diocese has a center for family assistance that handles marriage preparation as well as helping “married couples with difficulties and with the education of their children.”
Speaking to America following the press conference, Cardinal Gérald Cyprien Lacroix of Quebec said, “We need to strengthen the way we accompany couples who come for marriage. A weekend doesn’t do it.”
Marriage preparation, he said, should not be regarded by the church or by couples as boxes to check off. Rather, he said, “We need to evangelize, bring them to a personal encounter with Jesus, with the community of the church, and let them grow into that.”
The cardinal added, “The young people are searching. And if we don’t offer something serious in hospitality and welcome and walking with and with them paths that are filled with life, we’re missing the point. That’s what we’re there for.”
It remains to be seen what concrete proposals the group ultimately makes for how to better accompany families and couples. Father Costa explained this afternoon that Pope Leo had asked personally that the synthesis report, which will be finalized on Wednesday, the last day of the meeting, not be published, “contrary to what we had previously announced.”
Pope Leo, he said, “wanted to hear the report himself and have the opportunity to speak about it. He therefore wishes to receive it and, once he has completed his hospitalization, to revisit the materials and what has been said over these days, so that he can also offer his own words.”
“I’m sorry about this,” he concluded. “We had promised the report, and we were all convinced it would be published.”
The Vatican announced this evening that the pope had canceled all of his audiences through Tuesday, Oct. 20.
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