Vatican City - The news has taken bishops by surprise and opens a new phase of ecclesial reflection on the family: Leo XIV has decided to convene the Presidents of the Episcopal Conferences from all over the world in October 2026 “in order to proceed, through mutual listening, towards a synodal discernment on the steps to be taken to proclaim the Gospel to families today, in the light of Amoris laetitia and taking into account what is being carried out in the local Churches”. The Pope writes this in the message released this morning, on the solemnity of Saint Joseph, on the tenth anniversary of the apostolic exhortation desired by Pope Francis.
Leo XIV’s text is not confined to a commemoration. It treats the tenth anniversary of Amoris laetitia as both a moment of assessment and a moment of renewed impetus. The Pontiff begins from a precise reading: that 2016 document was the “fruit of three years of synodal discernment sustained by the Holy Year of Mercy” and gave the Church an impetus towards “study and pastoral conversion”. For this reason, today, in a time marked by “rapid transformations”, it is not enough merely to remember. The journey must continue.
Francis’ document on the family
To understand the meaning of Leo XIV’s decision, one has to go back to what Amoris laetitia actually was. The exhortation, the second of Pope Francis, is dated 19 March 2016 and was made public on 8 April of that year. The text brought together the summaries of the two Synods on the Family convened by Francis: the extraordinary synod of 2014, dedicated to the “pastoral challenges of the family in the context of evangelisation”, and the ordinary synod of 2015, on the “vocation and mission of the family in the Church and in the contemporary world”. It was therefore a document born within an ecclesial process, not an isolated intervention by the Pope.
Leo XIV himself insists on this origin. He explicitly recalls the “anthropological-cultural changes” already identified by Francis and refers to the address of 17 October 2015, in which the need for “mutual listening” within the people of Godwas discussed. The criterion, the Pope reiterates today, was and remains clear: one cannot speak about the family without consulting families, without listening to their “joys”, “hopes”, “sorrows” and “anguish”. In this line, Amoris laetitia was not conceived as a theoretical treatise, but as the fruit of a discernment matured in contact with concrete reality.
Francis’ document is structured in nine chapters and 41 sub-chapters. Its themes range across Scripture, the reality of families, marriage, fruitfulness, pastoral perspectives, the education of children, fragility, and conjugal and family spirituality. The overall framework, therefore, is broad: it does not concern a single disciplinary issue, but a way of looking at family life, the sacrament of marriage and the Church’s mission. Yet from the outset Amoris laetitia proved to be a problematic document because it sparked broad debate over a number of controversial points. The centre of the discussion focused above all on Chapter VIII, devoted to “accompanying, discerning and integrating weakness”, particularly in relation to the divorced and civilly remarried and access to the sacraments. Just as happened with the Second Vatican Council, the press produced many headlines and a great deal of noise, but none of what was being written had actually been envisaged in Amoris laetitia. The wording of certain phrases, however, deliberately left room for differing interpretations.
The cardinals’ dubia
The controversy erupted around one much-disputed passage, footnote 351. There it is stated that, in certain objective situations of sin not fully culpable on the subjective level, a person may live in the grace of God and in “certain cases” also receive “the help of the Sacraments”. From that moment an interpretative clash opened up involving theologians, canon lawyers, cardinals and episcopal conferences. Some saw in that wording a development of the Church’s pastoral teaching; others denounced ambiguities and possible contradictions with previous discipline. In June 2016, a group of Catholic scholars sent the cardinals a letter asking that Pope Francis distance himself from certain passages of the exhortation regarded as problematic. A few months later came the well-known dubia of Cardinals Raymond Leo Burke, Carlo Caffarra, Walter Brandmüller and Joachim Meisner: five questions framed so as to obtain a clear yes-or-no answer, focused above all on Chapter VIII and on the question of access to the sacraments for the divorced and civilly remarried. Pope Francis did not reply, and that very silence helped to fuel discontent and deepen the divisions that had already emerged in the ecclesial debate. Later there also came the so-called Correctio filialis, a document cast in still harsher and more accusatory tones.
In practical terms, the tension translated into differing pastoral guidelines. Some bishops confirmed a restrictive interpretation, insisting on continence as a condition for access to the sacraments; others opened the way to broader paths of discernment. In the diocese of Buenos Aires, the one from which Pope Francis came, Chapter VIII was interpreted in a more open sense; an interpretation that was subsequently taken up as an authoritative reference point in the ecclesial debate. It was precisely here that one of the most delicate issues of the pontificate emerged: a formulation considered by many to be insufficiently clear, which ended up fostering division, confusion and differing practices among dioceses and episcopal conferences, with the risk of compromising the Church’s pastoral unity.
Leo XIV’s choice
It is within this framework that Leo XIV’s message should be read. The Pope does not enter the old opposing camps in a polemical way, but carefully selects what, in his judgement, remains decisive in Amoris laetitia today. First of all, he recalls the vision of the family as the “foundation of society”, a gift of God and a “school of human enrichment”. He then insists on the sacramental nature of marriage, presenting Christian spouses as a kind of “domestic Church”, essential to education and to the transmission of the faith.
But the heart of the text lies above all in the way Leo XIV takes up the pastoral content of the exhortation. In his view, Amoris laetitia handed on to the Church a number of fundamental axes that still need to be explored more deeply. There is, first of all, the “biblical hope of the loving and merciful presence of God”, which makes it possible to live “stories of love” even when passing through “family crises”. Then there is the invitation to take on “the gaze of Jesus” and never to cease promoting “the growth, strengthening and deepening of conjugal and family love”. There is also the affirmation that marital love “always gives life” and is “real” precisely in its “limited and earthly” form, according to a logic that Leo XIV explicitly connects to the mystery of the Incarnation. The Pope also takes up some very concrete themes from Francis’ document. He underlines “the need to develop new pastoral paths”, to “strengthen the education of children”, to “accompany, discern and integrate fragility”, and to promote “the spirituality that springs from family life”. It is a vocabulary that clearly shows where Leo XIV intends to place himself: not on a line of hardening, but neither on one of sociological reduction. His emphasis falls on pastoral conversion and on the Church’s ability to remain within situations of fragility without emptying the Gospel of its substance.
In essence, Leo XIV appears to have taken on board the appeals that have reached him in recent months from cardinals and bishops, but he chooses not to present Amoris laetitia as a text to be openly corrected. Instead, he prefers to place the matter within a broader framework, speaking of the changes now under way that make a new ecclesial discussion necessary. It is a method he has already used at other moments in this short pontificate: even in relation to the diocese of Rome and to certain Vatican bodies strongly desired by Francis, the Pope has not chosen the path of rupture, but that of gradual revision. Not, then, a dramatic repudiation, but a gradual intervention, made up of targeted adjustments and precise corrections considered necessary.
A message aimed at restoring the family to the centre
One passage in this message deserves particular attention. Leo XIV says that fragility “is part of the wonder that we are” and adds that man is not made “for a life in which everything is settled and fixed, but for an existence constantly renewed in self-gift, in love”. If the Church is to proclaim the Gospel of the family to younger generations, then, it must learn to show the beauty of the vocation to marriage precisely within the recognition of fragility. It is not, therefore, a matter of setting ideal and limitation against each other, but of presenting Christian marriage as the place in which grace works within the concreteness of existence.
Leo XIV then broadens his gaze to the sufferings affecting families today. He asks for particular support for those marked by poverty and violence, and he thanks the families which, despite difficulties, live out “the spirituality of family love” made up of “thousands of real and concrete gestures”. Here too the criterion is eloquent: the Pope does not speak of the family as an abstract category, but as a real subject of ecclesial and social life.
Finally, Leo XIV writes that the present time demands “particular pastoral attention to families”, because it is precisely to them that the Lord entrusts a decisive part of the Church’s mission. Hence the need for an ecclesial commitment that “must be renewed and deepened”, so that spouses may live their love “in Christ” and young people may once again perceive the attractiveness of the vocation to marriage. Within this framework, the Pope’s decision to begin a new ecclesial listening process becomes intelligible, one that will inevitably also lead to a re-reading of Amoris laetitia, a document that has remained at the centre of strong tensions. It is the first truly broad-ranging step of this pontificate, and Leo XIV has chosen to take it on the issue of the family.
fr.G.B.
Silere non possum