Pope Leo XIV has called on Church leaders to address the “growing distance” between the “ways in which sex and intimacy are lived and the Christian vision of marriage”. Source: NCR Online.
Opening a major Vatican summit yesterday on Pope Francis’s somewhat controversial document on the family, Pope Leo told the heads of bishops’ conferences around the world to confront the tough questions about Catholic teaching on sex and marriage “with courage”.
“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,” the Pope said.
“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.”
Pope Leo, who has said that matters of sexual morality should not be the Church’s priority, convened 152 Church leaders and theological experts to assess the reception of Francis’s Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”) 10 years after its publication.
The document, which emerged from two synods on the family in 2014 and 2015, drew controversy after one of its 391 footnotes seemingly opened the door for Catholics in “irregular” situations, such as people who have divorced and civilly remarried, to receive Communion.
With his decision to bring Church leaders to Rome to discuss the document anew, Leo, it seems, is seeking a course correction.
The Pope asked participants at the start of the seven-day summit to consider where the Church’s “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?”
Pope Leo also drew attention to the question of human fragility, which he said “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, and whether we can recognise the work of grace even in situations marked by limits, wounds and apparent failure.”
FULL STORY
Pope Leo urges frank reckoning with Catholic teaching on sex and marriage (By Justin McLellan, NCR Online)
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