Amoris laetitia: Pastoral experiences in Asia and challenges of digital world

By Alessandro Di Bussolo

Families today are “a challenging mosaic of diverse realities, marked by joys, hopes, struggles and wounds. The family is not only a place to which the Church brings the Gospel. It is also a place from which the Gospel comes alive – from one generation to another, from one family to another, and from families to society.”

Cardinal Filipe Neri Ferrão, Metropolitan Archbishop of Goa and Daman, opened his address with this reflection at the start of the second day of Pope Leo XIV’s meeting with the heads of the Eastern Churches and the presidents of the Bishops’ Conferences, ten years after Amoris laetitia.

Making families enduring places of God’s revelation

The Indian Cardinal addressed the theme “Families today: reality, beauty and challenges. Discerning the signs of the times through the experience of families and the Church’s pastoral commitment today.”

He invited participants in the meeting, conducted in a synodal style, to ask themselves in their discernment: “What is the Holy Spirit asking the Church to change?”

This concerned “not only in what we do for the families, but in how we understand, accompany and empower them as protagonists of the Gospel and as enduring loci of God’s revelation.”

Religious polarization affecting Christian families in Asia

Drawing on his experience as a pastor in Asia, particularly in India, Cardinal Neri Ferrão acknowledged that families had changed in their identity, nature, and composition, with smaller households, new forms of cohabitation, and interreligious marriages.

Families were increasingly on the move, and many faced economic insecurity, poverty, unemployment, and uncertainty about the future.

“Christian families in many parts of India and Asia,” the Cardinal stressed, “must also live amid growing religious polarisation and hostility, making the public expression and transmission of faith increasingly difficult.”

Beauty of families caring for elderly and sick

Yet, these families also offered the Church beauty through their care for children, the elderly, the sick, and vulnerable people. Even amid poverty and uncertainty, the Cardinal explained, “our families continue to create positive spaces for joy and hope.”

Following the publication of Amoris laetitia, he recalled, the Churches in India and across Asia “listened first to families,” and that listening “shaped how we walk with them. We now see marriage preparation as the start of a lifelong journey, offer spiritual renewal and counselling to couples and children, and keep forming families and lay leaders over time.”

Families collaborating with the Church in its mission

He stressed that pastoral ministry needed to move “from mission to families to mission among families.” Families were not simply recipients of assistance but, in his words, “the Church’s partners in mission.”

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Cardinal Neri Ferrão concluded by recounting the experience of a priest who had begun family ministry in his parish not with a program, but by visiting a family experiencing underlying difficulties in communication between the parents and between them and their children. It had begun with “a conversation and a willingness to listen.”

Rosito: Importance of relationships in family and Church

The second speaker, Vincenzo Rosito, Professor of the History and Culture of Family Institutions at the Pontifical Lateran University and Vice Dean of the Pontifical John Paul II Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences, summed up his address with questions to guide participants’ synodal discernment.

He began with an invitation inspired by Pope Leo XIV’s reflections in the encyclical Magnifica humanitas: “Let each of us be mindful of the relationships we build within our own families and within the Church.”

Professor Rosito stressed that “family practices, in fact, help us to understand how churches and families learn from one another. Both the Church and the family, in fact, learn through the practices of their daily lives.”

Changes as opportunities

He then offered a question for participants to consider as a father, mother, theologian, or pastor: “Am I able to recognise and share with others at least one new thing that I have learnt to do, or to do differently, in recent years of my family or pastoral life?”

Changes in family life, Prof. Rosito explained, “are not problems” but “human activities.” Recalling Amoris laetitia, he presented them as an opportunity, as concrete processes “in which individuals and families act, react, learn and develop new resources.”

“Consider, for example,” the political philosopher continued, “how the use of new digital technologies is transforming the daily habits of families and the way children are brought up.”

New ways of being families and Church

The family and the Church, Prof. Rosito continued, “learn together through change.” He drew on the Gospel image of Jesus, Joseph, and Mary’s flight into Egypt.

He noted that today, “drawing on the experiences of refugee and migrant families, some Christian communities are re-establishing themselves as ‘refuge churches’” for those arriving in a new land or making a long journey.

He also addressed the tragedy of violence shared by many families: “The insecurity stemming from social and political violence is a worrying reality that many Churches must deal with today, in their daily lives.” Such insecurity, he warned, could “even devour family bonds and church relationships themselves.”

Joseph’s dream was also part of the experience of this flight.

“To dream, to imagine new forms for the Church,” Prof. Rosito concluded, “also means renewing what we already do. To imagine the Church means being willing to learn from one another, whilst we are transformed together, as churches and as families.”

His final question for discernment was therefore: “What do we need, amidst the light and shadow of today, to learn and imagine new ways of being a family and new ways of being the Church?”