The Measure of Society: How it Sustains, Defends, and Promotes the Family

“There are, in fact, places and circumstances in which the Church ‘can become the salt of the earth’ only through the lay faithful and, in particular, through families. For this reason, the Church’s commitment in this area 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.”

― Pope Leo XIV, Message on the Tenth Anniversary of Amoris Laetitia

On the Solemnity of St. Joseph, March 19, Pope Leo XIV announced that he is convening the presidents of the world’s Episcopal Conferences in Rome this October. The occasion is the tenth anniversary of the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia. The purpose of the meeting, in his own words, is “to proceed, in mutual listening, to a synodal discernment on the steps to be taken in order to proclaim the Gospel to families today.”

In other words, the Pope is calling the bishops home, from every part of the world, to face one question together: How does the Church evangelize families now?

The Holy Father entrusted the journey to St. Joseph, “guardian of the Holy Family of Nazareth.” He is asking the bishops, and through them all the faithful, to look to the Holy Family as the pattern of every Christian household.

Pope Leo XIV on Marriage

To grasp what is at stake in October, consider how Pope Leo has consistently spoken about marriage and the family throughout his first year.

Just before the Jubilee of Families, on May 28, 2025, the Holy Father sent a message to participants in a Vatican seminar discussing how to evangelize families in modern society. In it, he called bishops to be “fishers of families,” and asked the laity to join them as “fishers” of “couples, young people, children, women and men of all ages and circumstances.”

That theme deepened at the Mass Concluding the Jubilee of Families, Children, Grandparents, and the Elderly on June 1, 2025, where the Holy Father said that “marriage is not an ideal but the measure of true love between a man and a woman: a love that is total, faithful and fruitful. This love makes you one flesh and enables you, in the image of God, to bestow the gift of life.”

Some pastors have grown accustomed to speaking of marriage as a “high ideal” that few are realistically expected to attain. The Pope, however, rejects that framing. Marriage is not the elusive summit. It is the lived reality.

He urged couples “to be examples of integrity to your children, acting as you want them to act, educating them in freedom through obedience, always seeing the good in them and finding ways to nurture it.”

The Holy Father held up the parents of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Sts. Louis and Zélie Martin, and the Polish Ulma family, who were martyred together in 1944, as witnesses to that vocation. “Today’s world,” he told the families gathered in St. Peter’s Square, “needs the marriage covenant in order to know and accept God’s love and to defeat, thanks to its unifying and reconciling power, the forces that break down relationships and societies.”

In his defense of marriage, Pope Leo has been direct on the fundamental indissolubility of the covenant. In November 2025, in an address on marriage annulment, he warned that “human judgment on the nullity of marriage cannot however be manipulated by false mercy.”

Two months later, at the inauguration of the Roman Rota’s judicial year, he returned to the theme, warning of “a dangerous relativization of truth” produced by what he called “misunderstood compassion, even if apparently motivated by pastoral zeal.”

Why the Pope Is Calling the Bishops Home

Why now? Consider the data.

In April, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that U.S. births fell about one percent in 2025 to roughly 3.6 million. The American total fertility rate remains well below the replacement level of 2.1. The picture is no better, and often much worse, across Europe and East Asia. The Guardian recently ran a feature on what happens to societies when deaths begin to outnumber births. China, this past January, reported its lowest birth rate since 1949.

The cultural numbers tell a similar story. In a 2023 Pew Research Center survey of what Americans see as essential to a fulfilling life, only 23 percent said being married was “extremely” or “very” important, and only 26 percent said the same of having children. Of all the factors tested, marriage came in dead last. More Americans are raising children outside marriage than ever before. More are cohabiting without children. Fewer are marrying at all.

The change since 1970 is dramatic. In that year, two-thirds of Americans aged 25 to 49 were living with a spouse and at least one child under eighteen. By 2023, only 37 percent were. The married household raising children, once the unquestioned norm of American life, is now a minority arrangement.

Pope St. John Paul II saw this coming. “At a moment of history in which the family is the object of numerous forces that seek to destroy it or in some way to deform it,” he wrote in 1981 in Familiaris Consortio, “and aware that the well-being of society and her own good are intimately tied to the good of the family, the Church perceives in a more urgent and compelling way her mission of proclaiming to all people the plan of God for marriage and the family” (no. 3).

Forty-five years on, the forces he named have advanced. So has the urgency. This is what Pope Leo seems to be acknowledging, by focusing this October’s meeting of the bishops on evangelizing the family.

Renewal Without Compromise

In emphasizing how the family is the Domestic Church, and the fundamental cell of society, Pope Leo is operating in a venerable tradition.

The Second Vatican Council called the family “the basis of society” and “a school for human enrichment.” Lumen Gentium describes Christian spouses as forming “a kind of domestic church” (no. 11). In Familiaris Consortio, Pope St. John Paul II taught that the family “has the mission to guard, reveal and communicate love, and this is a living reflection of and a real sharing in God’s love for humanity and the love of Christ the Lord for the Church His bride” (no. 17).

The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts the matter simply: “The Christian family is a communion of persons, a sign and image of the communion of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit. In the procreation and education of children it reflects the Father’s work of creation” (no. 2205).

In the same message quoted above, Pope Leo recalled three themes from Amoris Laetitia that should guide the October discernment.

First, new pastoral methods (no. 199). The thirty-five years since Familiaris Consortio have produced what Amoris Laetitia calls “anthropological and cultural changes” so pronounced that older modes of family ministry no longer match the moment. Pope Leo wants the bishops to bring back from Rome new approaches drawn from what is already working in the local Church in different parts of the world.

At the same time, he has emphasized that whatever new pastoral methods emerge, they must be pursued without compromising the truth of the marriage covenant. That is what Pope Leo told the judges of the Roman Rota in January, saying they are called to “guard the truth with rigour but without rigidity, and to exercise charity without omission.” The bishops will need to apply that same standard to every pastoral question on the table. Pastoral renewal is not doctrinal softening. Pope Leo has said so plainly.

Second, the education of children (AL, chap. VII). Catholic families, the Pope reminded us at the Jubilee of Families, are responsible for handing on the faith “together with life, generation after generation.” That handing-on cannot be outsourced to the parish, the school, or the catechist. It happens at the family table.

Third, the spirituality of family life (AL, no. 313). The Holy Father highlighted a spirituality “made up of thousands of small but real gestures” (AL, no. 315), the daily, undramatic faithfulness of husbands, wives, parents, grandparents, and children.

A Word to Families and Pastors

The Holy Father has called the bishops to Rome. However, the ultimate work he is calling for cannot be done in Rome. It must be done in the parish, in the home, at the kitchen table, in the classroom, and at the bedside of the elderly.

Imagine if every Catholic family read Pope Leo’s anniversary message together this week. If every parish priest preached on the dignity of marriage as the measure of true love, rather than as a sentimental ideal. If every diocesan family ministry took seriously the Holy Father’s warning that, in many places, the Church cannot be salt without the family.

That is the real work the October summit can only begin. Without it, the summit will be one more document filed away.

To you, dear parents: the Holy Father is asking you to live your vocation with renewed clarity. Your fidelity to one another, and your patient handing-on of the faith to your children, matter enormously. Do not underestimate them.

To you, dear pastors: the Holy Father is asking you to preach this teaching boldly. To bless and accompany families. To say what the Church actually teaches about marriage, not merely to speak warmly around it. The bishops gathering in Rome need your courage now, in the pulpit and in the confessional, not in October alone.

And to grandparents: the Holy Father has recognized your importance. At the Jubilee, he gave you a specific charge. Watch over your loved ones “with wisdom and compassion, and with the humility and patience that come with age.” Where parents are exhausted, distracted, or absent, the prayer and steady presence of a grandmother or grandfather can hold a family together. Many grown children who today have wandered from the Church will return, with God’s grace, through the witness of grandparents who never stopped praying for them.

And to all of us, the Holy Father is asking for prayer. He has entrusted the journey to St. Joseph. Let us join him in that entrustment. Let us pray for the bishops who will gather in Rome. Let us pray for the families of our parishes, in their joys and in their wounds. Let us pray that the cradle of the future of humanity, to use Pope Leo’s own image, may once again be a place where children are welcomed, where spouses are faithful, and where the faith is handed on from one generation to the next.

Pope St. John Paul II, in Familiaris Consortio, placed the family’s identity and its mission in a single command: “Family, become what you are” (no. 17). That, in the end, is the work of the October summit. May Our Lord, through the prayers of the Holy Family, grant Pope Leo and his brother bishops the courage and clarity that the hour requires.