‘Amoris laetitia’: Listening to family fragilities, avoiding hasty judgment

By Antonella Palermo

“In the face of the fragility experienced by families, Amoris laetitia invited us to give priority to listening, to avoid judging too quickly, and to allow ourselves to be surprised by the action of God’s grace in their lives”, Cardinal Kevin Farrell said on Monday as he set out the theme for the fourth day of the Vatican encounter dedicated to the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris laetitia ten years after its publication.

The Prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life opened the fifth day of the Vatican gathering dedicated to the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris laetitia, ten years after its publication.

Professor Julie Hanlon Rubio, a professor Christian Social Ethics at the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University (Berkeley), emphasized in her address that “the Church can offer a challenging vision of marriage as intimate partnership oriented to love and justice that does not require perfection”.

Cardinal Pablo Virgilio Siongco David, Bishop of Kalookan in the Philippines, shared the story of a pivotal pastoral experience that, over the years, led to avoiding simplistic stigmatization of the family, allowing the Gospel to emerge precisely within those fragilities.

A global trend of moving away from marriage

The theological reflection began with data regarding the choice of marriage today, compared with figures from several decades ago.

We are witnessing a clear acceleration of the global trend away from marriage—spanning from the Philippines to Poland, Argentina to South Africa, and the United States to Japan. The percentage of adults who have never married, Rubio noted, will continue to rise. Notably, fewer U.S. Catholics marry today than fifty years ago, and only a quarter of them have a Church wedding.

Fertility rates are also falling everywhere, including in countries such as Kenya, Ukraine, and India. Baptism rates have likewise dropped, standing at about one-third of the levels seen in the 1990s.

The issue, the American professor argued, is that “today’s marriages are more mutual and fulfilling but also more ambitious, less fruitful, and more fragile”. When love is essential to marriage, she explained, finding a suitable partner becomes more difficult.

Some women reject this path, discouraged by a landscape of marital unions where infidelity and domestic violence are commonplace. This gives rise to deep reservations—often rooted in a sense of being unprepared for parenthood—leading people to postpone having children, only to discover later that the right time to raise a family has already passed.

Church responds with its ‘compelling vision’

Rubio highlighted a crucial contemporary issue: “Catholic couples especially tend to remain isolated in their struggles.” This fact is also evident in the high divorce rates among older couples.

Therefore, according to the speaker, there is an urgent need to encourage couples to “look outward”—something increasingly rare today. In this regard, Catholic theology offers a key insight: an intimate union committed to something greater.

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“At this moment, the world needs the Church to respond to the fragility of marriage with its compelling vision”, Rubio stated, noting that Pope Francis himself had said, “the fact that… love is imperfect doesn’t mean it is false or unreal.” Magnifica humanitas is also explicit on this point: human fragility is not a problem to be solved, but a fundamental element of our humanity to be integrated.

Listening to real-life stories and actual struggles

Cardinal Pablo Virgilio Siongco David, from the Philippines, illustrated situations specific to the reality of his Diocese of Kalookan. He did so in a moving address, citing concrete examples of how Amoris laetitia has helped foster a fundamental understanding: we must not limit ourselves to asking “how close families are to the ideal, but also how close the Church is willing to come to families in their actual struggles”.

“Accompaniment, then, is not merely what a priest or pastoral worker does for a family. It is what the Christian community gradually learns to become around that family”, the Cardinal emphasized.

He gave the example in his own diocese of the “Mission Stations”—a method of evangelization in particularly painful contexts where family life can be compromised by poverty, migration, violence, addiction, incarceration, injustice, and precarious employment. These are realities that “an severely limit people’s freedom and their capacity even to approximate the Christian ideal of family life”, the cardinal said.

Moving beyond classifications based on the family ideal

“This is why Amoris laetitia has been so important for us”, he said. “It does not ask us to abandon the ideal. It asks us to accompany real people in the often painful distance between the ideal and their actual situation. It gave us a language for what we were already learning pastorally: to discern concrete situations rather than begin with classifications, to accompany gradual growth, and to trust that grace can already be at work even in lives and relationships marked by weakness and incompleteness.”

In short, it was a true “pastoral lesson,” especially in the Manila metropolitan area—part of the Diocese’s territory—where family poverty can foster deep isolation and where the situation is exacerbated by the prevalence of drugs and addiction.

By listening to “extreme” experiences, the Church has learned that “what first appears to us as an irresponsible or dysfunctional family can look very different when we enter the home and listen to its story.”