Bishop Lowe to attend gathering on the family

Pope Leo XIV has convened the meeting from October 7-14, with 11 married couples from five continents scheduled to explain the challenges they encounter in passing on the faith in increasingly secularised societies.

The meeting is being hosted on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Amoris Laetitia, the apostolic exhortation published by Pope Francis in 2016 following the previous year’s Synod on the Family.

According to the Dicastery for the Laity, the Family, and Life, participants in the meeting will include the presidents of the world’s 115 bishops’ conferences, the heads of the 15 Eastern Catholic Churches and 22 additional bishops invited by the Holy Father.

Gabriella Gambino, a laywoman, mother of five and doctor of bioethics who has served as undersecretary of that Dicastery since 2017, emphasised the gathering “is not about evaluating a text but about deepening our understanding of the family and pastoral realities that have received and interpreted this document in different ways, just as the life of the Church is diverse in the various places around the world where it is present and rooted in the one Gospel”.

“The central point on which we must focus our attention is that the Church’s goal is not to see texts applied mechanically and uniformly in every reality, because each one has characteristics that are very different from the others,” she said.

She stated that the central question of the meeting is: “How is the faith transmitted today? How is faith passed on in families today, and how do families contribute to building up the Church?”

To illustrate the scale of ongoing changes in religious practice, Gambino offered some statistics. In Poland, religious marriages celebrated over the last five years have declined by 45 per cent. In Australia, they have fallen from 88 per cent in 1970 to 16 per cent in 2024.

In her view, these are signs that, in different contexts, highlight the need for better accompaniment of couples in their decision to marry and providing stronger support for the transmission of faith within the family.

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10 years after Amoris Laetitia, bishops to discuss challenges of families at the Vatican (EWTN News/By Victoria Cardiel)