Family summit at the Vatican, Pope: "From sex to fragility, answering the questions"

For a whole week, from today until 14 October, a summit on the family will be held in the Vatican, wanted by Pope Leo The pontiff, opening the summit, asked the bishops to listen to "families, including those marked by difficulties, loneliness and sometimes even apparent failures" because "we certainly have a lot to learn" and "their lives also pose questions to us that deserve to be faced with courage". Leone cited "a growing distance between the way sex and intimacy are experienced and the Christian vision of marriage", as well as the difficulty of young people in making "a lifelong commitment".

The family summit

"Family life offers a privileged point of access to the great cultural, economic, social and political issues of our time, including the work of promoting peace between peoples", the pontiff said in his opening speech. For the occasion, Leo XIV called together the presidents of the Episcopal Conferences for an event of "mutual listening". There are 187 participants in total. The heads of the Eastern Churches also arrived in Rome, together with 11 families from the five continents.

The problems of today's families

The works will be closed by the Pontiff on the last day of the event, 14 October. In the background, as anticipated by the Prevost himself, there are the problems of families, in various areas, but also the ever-increasing decline in religious marriages. "Some data - as underlined in recent days by Gabriella Gambino, undersecretary of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life - help to grasp the extent of the cultural transformations taking place: in Poland, religious marriages celebrated in the last 5 years have reduced by 45%. In Australia, between 1970 and 2024 they went from 88% to 16%. These are signals which, in the diversity of contexts, recall the urgency of accompanying the choice of marriage and to support in a more decisive way the transmission of the faith in the family".