This morning, Pope Leo XIV opens a week-long meeting in Rome, ten years after Pope Francis promulgated his exhortation on Love and the Family, Amoris Laetitia. The meeting is titled “Ten Years After Amoris Laetitia: Proclaiming the Gospel With Families Today.”
Leo first announced this meeting on March 19, the anniversary of the signing of the exhortation and the feast of St. Joseph. It will bring together the presidents of the world’s bishops’ conferences, the heads of the Eastern Catholic Churches, twenty-two additional bishops and cardinals, and participating priests, religious, experts, laypeople, and married couples from around the world. The meeting will be held behind closed doors. According to Vatican News, there are 187 participants, including 111 conference presidents and four delegates, fifteen from the Eastern Churches, and twenty-two guests invited by the Pope. Among those guests are several Cardinals who played a crucial role in Francis’s pontificate and are known to support his teachings, including Americans Cupich, McElroy, and Tobin, and Curia Cardinals Tagle and Fernández.
Coordinators have stated clearly that this is not a synod, but a consultative meeting convened in a synodal style. They will be following the “conversation in the Spirit” method that was used at the Synod on Synodality, and the expected result will be a synthesis report rather than a new document. In the words of one organizer, the question now is what the Church has learned by trying to live the exhortation. One of the five themes concerns accompanying and supporting families in difficult or complex situations, including separation and divorce.
This meeting may, perhaps, finally put an end to the desperate “we’re so back” or “Leo is reversing Francis” narrative that some in Catholic media have clung to desperately since the day Leo stepped out onto the Loggia wearing a mozzetta.
Thus far, Leo has proven to be a pope of continuity with his predecessor, reaffirming Pope Francis’s teachings and upholding many of the policies that Francis’s critics fiercely opposed. For example, Leo continued the joint agreement with China on the selection of bishops — framed by many of Francis’s critics as a betrayal of Chinese Catholics. Leo has also strongly upheld Pope Francis’s 2018 development to Catholic teaching that the death penalty is inadmissible in all cases, once telling reporters, “Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion but I’m in favor of the death penalty,’ is not really pro-life.”
On the Tridentine Mass and the traditionalist movement, Leo has been much less outspoken than Francis, but there is no sign that he intends to reverse Pope Francis’s 2021 restrictions. Back in November, Archbishop Miguel Maury Buendía, apostolic nuncio to Great Britain, told the bishops that Pope Leo told him he was not going to abrogate Traditionis Custodes, Pope Francis’s decree limiting celebration of the older Mass. And despite the fanfare over Cardinal Burke being permitted to celebrate the older liturgy in St. Peter’s in 2025, permission was denied this year. To top it all off, after five decades and many failed attempts to reconcile them to the Church, it was finally left to Pope Leo to definitively close the door on the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X and finally issue them a decree of excommunication.
On LGBT Catholics, Leo has likewise continued in the same line as Francis, stating, “You’re all welcome, and let’s get to know one another and respect one another,” while affirming Fiducia Supplicans, the Francis-era document on blessing couples in so-called “irregular situations,” including same-sex couples (“of course we can bless all people”). He even had an audience with Fr. James Martin, Lord Voldemort of the Catholic right for his LGBT ministry, that by all indications was amicable and positive.
So what’s left? Does the anti-Francis brigade have any straws left to grasp for?
Amoris Laetitia is what’s left.
Of all the controversies (real or invented) of Francis’s papacy, nothing fueled the revolt of an ideologically motivated and well-funded contingent of Catholics against the Successor of Peter more than Amoris.
If Leo upholds Francis’s 2016 teaching on Love and the Family (and there’s no reason to believe he won’t — because the document is both doctrinally orthodox and pastorally profound), there will be many unhappy campers. And cardinals.
If you are unfamiliar with the controversy, Inside the Vatican hosted a great discussion this week between Colleen Dulle, Sebastian Gomes, and the great Austen Ivereigh. They discuss the origins of the controversy through Francis’s papacy and up to this week.
Watch the discussion on YouTube
And at Where Peter Is, we have created a new page collecting all our articles tagged “Amoris Laetitia” — about 130 in all, covering eight years. Click here to learn about the document from every possible angle. (It is also available under “topics” on our main menu.)
Have a great week.
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