Pope convokes presidents of Bishops’ Conferences for meeting on families

By Joseph Tulloch & Devin Watkins

A decade ago, Pope Francis published Amoris Laetitia, the Apostolic Exhortation on “love in the family," inspired by the Synods of Bishops of 2014 and 2015.

In a letter published on Wednesday, March 19, Pope Leo XIV praised the document as a “luminous message of hope regarding conjugal love and family life."

The 2016 Exhortation “encouraged reflection and pastoral conversion in the Church,” the Pope wrote, and “offers valuable teachings that we must continue to examine today.”

READ THE FULL TEXT OF THE POPE’S MESSAGE HERE

Meeting scheduled for October

In his letter, Pope Leo noted that we live in an era of “rapid changes,” including with regard to the family.

In light of these changes, the Pope announced he has decided to convene a meeting of the presidents of Bishops’ Conferences for a meeting in Rome in October 2026.

The Pope said the event will provide an opportunity “to proceed, in mutual listening, to a synodal discernment on the steps to be taken in order to proclaim the Gospel to families today, in light of Amoris Laetitia and taking into account what is currently being done in the local Churches.”

New pastoral methods

In his letter, Pope Leo described Amoris Laetitia as one of two Apostolic Exhortations since the Second Vatican Council which had “strengthened the Church’s doctrinal and pastoral commitment” to the service of families—the other being Pope John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio, published in 1981.

What Pope Francis had realized, Pope Leo wrote, is that “anthropological and cultural changes” in the family required “mutual listening” within the people of God, an insight which led him to call the Synods of Bishops on the family and, eventually, to write Amoris Laetitia.

What Pope Francis understood, said Pope Leo, was “it is not possible to speak about the family without engaging families themselves, listening to their joys and their hopes, their sorrows and their anguish.”

He thanked God for “the stimulus that has encouraged reflection and pastoral conversion in the Church.”

The family forms the basis of society, offering a “school for human enrichment,” he said, quoting the Second Vatican Council document Gaudium et Spes.

“Through the sacrament of marriage, Christian spouses form a kind of ‘domestic church,’ whose role is essential for teaching and transmitting the faith,” said the Pope.

However, he added, much in society has changed over the past several decades, which led to Pope Francis urging the 2015 Synod of Bishops to listen to the Holy Spirit and to families’ hopes, joys, sorrows, and anguish.

Proclaiming Gospel of the family to younger generations

Amoris Laetitia, said Pope Leo, offers valuable teachings on the biblical hope of God’s loving and merciful presence amid family crises; the call for marriage to always give life within the family; and the need for contemporary pastoral methods that help parents educate children and find depth of spirituality in their family life.

He called on the Church to find new ways to “evoke the beauty of the vocation to marriage precisely in the recognition of fragility,” so as to serve the mission of proclaiming the Gospel of the family to younger generations.

“We must also support families, especially those suffering from the many forms of poverty and violence present in contemporary society,” he said.

Pope Leo XIV concluded his letter on Amoris Laetitia by urging the Church to renew and deepen her commitment to the family, so that married couples may “fully live out their conjugal love, and that young people may feel attracted, within the Church, to the beauty of the vocation to marriage.”