Issue 24/2 (2018)

From  26-28  April  2018  INTAMS  held  an  international  symposium  at  the  Catholic University Leuven under the title “Troubled Love: Theology and Pastoral Care  for  all  Families”. In  the  aftermath  of  the  2014-2015  Bishops’ Synods  and  Pope Francis’s Postsynodal Exhortation Amoris  laetitia,  discussions  inside  the  church often focused on the so-called “irregular family situations”, i.e. forms of family life that do not follow the pattern the church has been stipulating in her traditional teaching. In Amoris laetitia Pope Francis recommended a more open and  welcoming  attitude  and  called  upon  pastors  to  care  in  a  particular  way  for  “the faithful who are living together, or are only married civilly, or are divorced and  remarried”  (AL  78).  The  controversies  which  the  papal  advance  caused  in  inner-church  circles  created  the  impression  that  the  church  was  dealing  here  with  a  relatively  restricted  and  in  fact  manageable  problem,  as  if  it  were  simply  a question of finding an appropriate modus operandi in order to respond to some dissenting  faithful  who  happen  to  deviate  in  their  personal  lifestyle  from  the  church’s instructions. Situating the issue at this level, however, would mean ignoring the scale of the problem. What is at stake here is nothing less than the almost insurmountable discrepancy that has been growing between the church’s teaching on marriage and family on the one side and the lived reality of those – whether Catholic or not – who form families today on the other.

With contributions by Thomas Knieps-Port le Roi, Elisabetta Ruspini, Jean Marsh, Susannah Cornwall, David Dawson Vasquez, Catherine Fino, Sylvia Barth, Jochen Sautermeister, Martina Kreidler-Kos.

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