Ahead of ‘Amoris’ meeting, plans uncertain

Some leaders are uncertain what to expect at an October meeting

Just one month ahead of a global meeting of bishops in the Vatican on Amoris laetitia, some episcopal leaders have told The Pillar that they have not received information about what to expect or how to prepare, and are eager to learn the pope’s plans for the scope and approach to the discussion.

St. Peter’s Basilica, seen from Rome’s Via della Conciliazione. Ernesto Spaziani via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The Dicastery for the Laity, Family, and Life published in July the thematic framework for an October meeting on Amoris laetitia, involving the leadership of bishops’ conferences from around the world. But The Pillar has consulted with the leadership of several bishops’ conferences, who said they haven’t received any additional information on the meeting beyond what has been made publicly available in July.

The meeting was announced by a March invitation from Pope Leo XIV to the presidents of the world’s episcopal conferences, asking them to meet in Rome next month “to proceed, in mutual listening, to a synodal discernment on the steps to be taken in order to proclaim the Gospel to families today.”

The meeting, the pope said, should take place “in light of Amoris laetitia and taking into account what is currently being done in the local Churches.”

Pope Leo said at the end of June’s extraordinary consistory that families would also be invited to participate in the meeting and share their experiences, saying that “their presence is essential.”

The pope encouraged bishops attending to “prepare by listening closely to, and bringing with them, the experience of the families in their own Churches.”

It is yet unclear which families will be invited to the meeting, how they will be chosen, and whether they will participate as full members, as speakers, or as observers in the meeting.

Moreover, there’s also a lack of clarity as to who is organizing the meeting, curial officials told The Pillar.

While the Dicastery for the Laity, Family, and Life published the topics for the meeting back in July, sources close to the dicastery told The Pillar that most of the organizational work for the meeting is being taken up by the Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops, which is in charge of the discussion’s logistics.

While the gathering will use the small-group methodology used in the Synod on Synodality and in both of Leo’s extraordinary consistories so far, its schedule has not yet been made available, nor has there been indication allotted for particular topics.

It is also not known if there will be any plenary speakers as part of the meeting or if there will be guiding meditations before each session.

Officials at several bishops’ conferences told The Pillar that they hadn’t received any additional instructions or information regarding the meeting, with some saying they expect to receive information in the early part of this month. Some officials expressed concern that the meeting is being held in a month but they do not yet have full knowledge of what they are being called to do — for example, it is not clear whether they will be expected to draft a document during the meeting, or just exchange views.

The Holy See published in July the topics and some preparatory documents for the meeting.

Between October 7-14, the participants will discuss five thematic areas, including the Church’s pastoral commitment with families, marriage and young people, the first years of marriage, marriage as mission, and accompanying families in complex situations.

The Dicastery for the Laity, Family, and Life said in a statement announcing the topics in July that the meeting was intended “to provide a genuine space for encounter, listening, and discernment: welcoming the lived experience of families, sharing concrete stories of life, reflecting on the pastoral initiatives through which the ecclesial community accompanies families, and engaging in dialogue with experts.”

The dicastery also added that bishops’ conferences and Eastern Catholic Churches should begin reflecting on the topics, “placing particular emphasis on listening to the families of their local Churches.”

“This is, therefore, an eminently pastoral journey, one that places families at its centre not merely as recipients of the Church’s pastoral care, but as active subjects of her mission, through whom the Gospel takes flesh in everyday relationships, choices, struggles, and hope,” the statement adds.

The dicastery also announced a thematic framework with topics to be discussed during the meeting, and urges bishops to listen to the experiences of families themselves ahead of the meeting, “recognizing together both the beauty of love as it takes shape in daily life and the fragilities that often affect it, including precarious employment and housing, illness, the challenges of raising children, emotional loneliness, and the care of family members with disabilities, the elderly, or those who are not self-sufficient.”

The discussion topics will include the issue of pastoral care for Catholics who have been divorced — who are statistically more likely to discontinue religious practice, a topic that has been in the past fraught with controversy over questions surrounding sacramental ministry.

In October, discussion will center around a different approach to the issues, with the question: “How can Christian communities be built in which those who have experienced suffering, abandonment, separation and divorce may truly feel listened to, involved and co-responsible?”

Further, the discussion will take up the question of how families can be understood and commissioned as missionaries, drawing on the experiences of learning the “languages of love, day after day,” in family life.

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Amoris laetitia was the result of the two-year Synod on the Family, celebrated between 2014 and 2015. While it deals with a range of issues on spiritual accompaniment and evangelization of families, it sparked significant controversy for its discussion of the possible reception of communion by divorced and civilly remarried Catholics in irregular situations.

The apostolic exhortation says in paragraph 305 that “a pastor cannot feel that it is enough simply to apply moral laws to those living in ‘irregular’ situations, as if they were stones to throw at people’s lives.”

The paragraph adds that “because of forms of conditioning and mitigating factors, it is possible that in an objective situation of sin – which may not be subjectively culpable, or fully such – a person can be living in God’s grace, can love and can also grow in the life of grace and charity, while receiving the Church’s help to this end.”

A footnote to the paragraph says that such help “can include the help of the sacraments” and adds that the Eucharist “is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.”

Later, the bishops of the Buenos Aires region in Argentina published an instruction for their priests in which they called for mutual discernment of a couple in an irregular union on whether they can receive communion and go to confession if “it is acknowledged, in a concrete case, that there are limitations that diminish responsibility and culpability.”

“Amoris laetitia opens the door to access to the sacraments of reconciliation and the Eucharist,” the bishops of Buenos Aires said.

Pope Francis later said that there was no alternative interpretation of the document, and the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith said in 2023 that the pope had included the Buenos Aires bishops’ instruction in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis and it therefore was considered “authentic magisterium.”

But while most of the discussion surrounding Amoris laetitia focused on reception of communion by people in irregular unions, Pope Leo’s letter didn’t mention the subject at all. Moreover, the topic framework only makes a short mention of divorce, without mentioning the sacraments at all.

The letter mentions a number of “valuable teachings that we must continue to examine today” in Amoris laetitia:

“The biblical hope of God’s loving and merciful presence, which allows us to live ‘love stories’ even when navigating ‘family crises’ (AL 8); the invitation to adopt ‘the gaze of Jesus’ (AL 60) and tirelessly to encourage ‘the growth, strengthening and deepening of conjugal and family love’ (AL 89); the call to appreciate that love in marriage ‘always gives life’ (AL 165).”

“Pope Francis affirmed the need ‘for new pastoral methods’ (AL 199) and for a better education of children (cf. AL chap. VII), while inviting the Church to accompany, discern and integrate fragility (cf. AL chap. VIII), overcoming a reductive conception of the norm, and to promote ‘the spirituality that unfolds in family life’ (AL 313),” it adds.

The pope says that pastoral attention to families is even more important now than when Amoris laetitia was written because the current era is one “marked by rapid changes.”

“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. For this reason, the Church’s commitment in this area must be renewed and deepened, so that those whom the Lord calls to marriage and family life can, in Christ, fully live out their conjugal love, and that young people may feel attracted, within the Church, to the beauty of the vocation to marriage,” the letter concludes.