On Thursday, Pope Leo XIV announced a meeting for this coming October to discuss one of his immediate predecessor’s most controversial documents: Amoris Laetitia.
Officially a post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation released in May of 2016 after two major synod assemblies on various aspects of family life in the twenty-first century, the 256-page Amoris Laetitia presented Francis’s thoughts on Christian family life and the sacrament of marriage.
The controversy was mostly caused by one paragraph in Chapter 8 of Amoris, which was on “Accompanying, Discerning and Integrating Weakness” and dealt with couples in what the Catholic Church has often called “irregular situations,” usually canonically invalid marriages.
“Because of forms of conditioning and mitigating factors,” Pope Francis wrote in paragraph 305, “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.”
But the controversy was in a footnote attached to that paragraph, footnote number 351.
“In certain cases,” the footnote read, “this can include the help of the sacraments,” an assertion many observers took to be essentially vacating the long-standing Catholic rule according to which invalidly married couples could not receive the sacraments so long as they remained sexually active.
It was so controversial, in fact, that four cardinals sent Pope Francis five dubia – a set of questions – asking him to clarify exactly what he meant with this passage.
Francis never answered those queries – not directly or in his own name, at any rate – though he did from time to time say and do things that gave observers the impression he agreed with one or another of the many replies proffered by his lieutenants and others, and stated in an interview that he doesn’t “lose sleep” over his critics’ reactions.
Fast forward ten years.
Leo XIV, Francis’s immediate successor and a new pope still in the first year of his pontificate, has announced his decision “to convene the presidents of the Episcopal Conferences from around the world in October 2026,” for a meeting to discern “the steps to be taken in order to proclaim the Gospel to families today.”
Leo’s message announcing the meeting says the October gathering is to be “in light of Amoris Laetitia and taking into account what is currently being done in the local Churches.”
Leo’s announcement also specifically mentions Chapter 8, the one with the controversial footnote.
“Pope Leo endorses Francis’ divisive 2016 text on Communion after civil remarriage,” read the headline in the Associated Press.
But Leo didn’t mention the statement on access to the sacraments for those in non-recognized marriages. It was a footnote in Chapter 8, which is 23 pages long, in a document that is the length of a novel.
Leo’s message also mentions Chapter 7, which is about improving children’s education. (No one seems interested, though.)
Something is stirring. Only, what is stirring?
Since his election, people have been reading the tea leaves when it comes to discussions about the new pontiff.
Pope Francis was a controversial figure in the Catholic Church, more open to the “liberal” wing of the leadership, who made radical departures from the ways of his “conservative” predecessors and frequently made himself a lightning rod with off-handed responses to questions.
Suffice it to say Pope Francis leaned into the narrative of a “Maverick” pontiff and garnered the headlines to prove it. Francis was “great for copy” as we say in the news trade.
Pope Francis ruled the Church for a dozen years and appointed the vast majority of cardinals who cast votes in the conclave that elected Leo XIV, so one question that has been a major focus during the first year of Leo’s reign has been: Will the new pope be like the last pope, or will he take a more conservative view?
Vatican watchers have examined Pope Leo XIV’s every word and action closely, in an effort to “read the tea leaves” of his early pontificate.
Pope Leo XIV has played a closely held game so far, quoting often from Pope Francis and also from both Benedict XVI and St. John Paul II. In his message on Thursday, Leo explicitly mentioned John Paul II’s 1981 Familiaris Consortio – another Apostolic Exhortation on the family, one that received short shrift from Francis in the eyes of many observers (not all of them implacable Francis critics).
Leo’s call for a meeting of the heads of bishops’ conferences is certainly a case of synodality-in-action. Leo calls – in words – for “a synodal discernment” that will be “in an effort to proceed, in mutual listening,” toward “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.”
That is Francis, through-and-through.
On the other hand, the meeting does not appear to any sort of formal gathering of the Synod of Bishops. There’s no mention of the body in the announcement, at least. An Extraordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops – which would involve the heads of bishops’ conferences as the primary participants – would last at least two weeks.
There are many tea leaves in the water around this meeting.
Pope Francis’s exhortation a decade ago was long and detailed, and presented the issues of family and marriage facing the Church today, but the news coverage of Francis’s book-long document and the reaction to it in the Catholic commentariat was literally overshadowed by a footnote.
(Some wags noted the Church’s first Jesuit pontiff was being, well, Jesuitical about the issue.)
Pope Leo XIV could be creating an opportunity for himself, to highlight some, at least, of literally everything else in Amoris that wasn’t one sentence in one paragraph of one chapter or in one footnote that, erm, accompanied it.
The new pontiff has scrupulously avoided explicit mention of either the infamous passage in Chapter 8 of Amoris or the controversy it engendered, but he has addressed the sanctity of Catholic marriage.
Speaking to the Roman Rota – the Vatican court that mostly deals with marriage annulment cases – on Jan. 26, Leo said he intended to offer “some reflections on the close connection between the truth of justice and the virtue of charity.”
“These are not two opposing principles, nor are they values to be balanced according to purely pragmatic criteria, but two intrinsically united dimensions that find their deepest harmony in the very mystery of God, who is Love and Truth,” the pope said.
He spoke of “a dialectical tension” that often arises between the demands of objective truth and the concerns of charity.
“Sometimes there is a risk that excessive identification with the oft troubled vicissitudes of the faithful may lead to a dangerous relativization of truth,” Leo told the members of the Rota.
“In fact,” Leo told the judges, “misunderstood compassion, even if apparently motivated by pastoral zeal, risks obscuring the necessary dimension of ascertaining the truth proper to the judicial office.”
That language of “misunderstood compassion” might have caught the attention of particularly attentive observers, because it encapsulates one of the possible motives Francis’s milder critics attributed to the language of the infamous footnote 351.
Leo offered it, however, in a wonky speech to professional jurists.
There were, perhaps, some interesting tea leaves in the message announcing the October meeting, too.
“Our era is marked by rapid changes,” Leo says in the message, changes that were already making it necessary “even more than ten years ago, to give particular pastoral attention to families, to whom the Lord entrusts the task of participating in the Church’s mission of proclaiming and witnessing to the Gospel.”
In case you’re keeping track, that last line of Leo’s carries a footnote of its own, to the aforementioned Familiaris Consortio of 1981.
Leo also says the Church’s commitment to the issues facing modern families “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.”
That line from Leo’s message isn’t footnoted, at all.
Catholics have seven months to study the tea leaves Leo will offer ahead of the October gathering.
In the meantime, one thing worth keeping top-of-mind is the possibility that, when all is said and done, the question of Holy Communion for the divorced-and-civilly-remarried won’t even be a footnote to it.
Follow Charles Collins on X: @CharlesinRome
