Vatican City, Sep 19, 2025 /
10:00 am
Pope Leo XIV on Friday said the Church and public institutions need to better support families in social and political life.
“Public institutions and the Church have a responsibility to seek ways to promote dialogue and strengthen the elements in society that favor family life and the education of its members,” the pontiff said Sept. 19 in reference to the encyclical letter Sollicitudo Rei Socialis of St. John Paul II.
“In this context,” he continued, “we can understand the family as a gift and a task. It is crucial to foster the co-responsibility and protagonism of families in social, political, and cultural life, promoting their valuable contribution to the community.”
Leo addressed the participants of a Sept. 17–19 Rome meeting on the future of the family during an audience in the Hall of the Consistory in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace.
The Rome gathering used a synodal method “to listen, discern, and imitate processes of cultural and structural transformation in response to the challenges faced by families in the peripheries, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, in dialogue with other regions of the world,” according to organizers.
“Living synodality in the family requires ‘walking together,’ sharing sorrows and joys, dialoguing respectfully and sincerely among all its members, learning to listen to one another and to make important family decisions together,” the pope told meeting participants.
Referencing Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, he said threats to the dignity of the family today include “problems related to poverty, lack of work and access to health care, abuse of the most vulnerable, migration, and war.”
“In every child, in every wife or husband, God entrusts us with his Son, his Mother, as he did with St. Joseph, so that together with them we may be the foundation, the leaven, and the witness of God’s love among men,” the Holy Father said.
The Jubilee of Hope, he noted, includes an invitation to think about the roots of one’s faith as received from parents and grandparents: “The persevering prayer of our grandmothers as they prayed the rosary, their simple, humble, and honest lives which, like leaven, sustained so many families and communities.”
The family is called “to be a domestic Church and a home where the fire of the Holy Spirit burns, spreading its warmth, contributing its gifts and experiences for the common good, and calling everyone to live in hope,” he said.
The “Jubilee and Synodal Meeting for Hopeful Discernment on the Future of Life and the Family” was organized by the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, the Latin American Episcopal Council, the Pontifical Academy for Life, and the John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences.
“Through this Jubilee and Synodal Meeting, the Church wishes to renew its commitment to defending life and the family, building bridges of fraternity and hope for the new generations,” organizers said in a press release.
Hannah Brockhaus is Catholic News Agency’s senior Vatican correspondent. After growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, she earned a degree in English from Truman State University in Missouri. In 2016, she moved to Rome, Italy, where in her spare time she enjoys reading and going on adventures with her husband and son.
