Evangelizing WITH the Families of Today and Tomorrow: Ecclesiological and Pastoral Challenges

“Dear brothers and sisters, I am pleased that following the celebration of the Jubilee for Families, Children, Grandparents, and the Elderly a group of experts has gathered at the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life to reflect on the theme, ‘Evangelizing WITH the Families of Today and Tomorrow: Ecclesiological and Pastoral Challenges.’” . Reading a Message by Pope Leo XIV, Gleison De Paula Souza, Secretary of the Dicastery, opened this morning’s seminar,“Evangelizing WITH the Families of Today and Tomorrow: Ecclesiological and Pastoral Challenges.”

A two-day meeting (2–3 June 2025) in which 40 theologians and experts in pastoral care of the family were invited by the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life to reflect and try to respond together to the Church’s concern about evangelization among young people and families in the face of huge contemporary challenges.

Pope Leo XIV: walking with families and becoming “fishers” of other families

Addressing participants, the Holy Father wrote: “This effort requires that special attention be paid to those families who, for various reasons, are spiritually most distant from us: those who do not feel involved, claim they are uninterested or feel excluded from the usual activities, yet would still like to be part of a community in which they can grow and journey together with others. How many people today simply do not hear the invitation to encounter God?”

In his Message, Pope Leo XIV continued: “I ask you, then, to join in the work of the whole Church in seeking out those families who no longer come to us, in learning how to walk with them and to help them embrace the faith and become in turn ‘fishers’ of other families.”

Identity and mission of the domestic Church and the vocation to marriage

How can we become “fishers of families” and “fisher families”? How can we engage the most distant families in evangelization? How can we present the vocation to marriage to young people? How can we help families recognize the vast missionary potential they carry within them? And finally, how can we accompany families in their human, spiritual, and pastoral needs, starting from their lived reality? Participants will share ideas and reflect on these questions using the method of synodal discernment of Conversation in the Spirit. The discussions and reflections will revolve around two key themes: the domestic Church: identity and mission; and the vocation to marriage: the interrelation between youth pastoral care, vocations promotion, and pastoral care of the family for a new generation of Christian families.

See below the Message of Pope Leo XIV to participants in the seminar: “Evangelizing with the Families of Today and Tomorrow: Ecclesiological and Pastoral Challenges”, organized by the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life (2-3 June 2025).

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Dear brothers and sisters,

I am pleased that following the celebration of the Jubilee for Families, Children, Grandparents, and the Elderly a group of experts has gathered at the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life to reflect on the theme, “Evangelizing with the Families of Today and Tomorrow: Ecclesiological and Pastoral Challenges”.

This theme clearly expresses the Church’s maternal concern for Christian families throughout the world as living members of the Mystical Body of Christ and the primary nucleus of the Church, to whom the Lord entrusts the transmission of faith and the Gospel, especially to the new generations.

The profound thirst for the infinite present in the heart of every human being means that parents have the duty to make their children aware of the fatherhood of God.  In the words of Saint Augustine: “As we have the source of life in you, O Lord, in your light we shall see light” (Confessions, XIII, 16).

Ours is a time marked by a growing search for spirituality, particularly evident in young people, who are longing for authentic relationships and guides in life.  Hence, it is important that the Christian community be farsighted in discerning the challenges of today’s world and in nurturing the desire for faith present in the heart of every man and woman.

This effort requires that special attention be paid to those families who, for various reasons, are spiritually most distant from us: those who do not feel involved, claim they are uninterested or feel excluded from the usual activities, yet would still like to be part of a community in which they can grow and journey together with others.  How many people today simply do not hear the invitation to encounter God?

Sadly, in the face of this need, an increasingly widespread “privatization” of faith often prevents these brothers and sisters from knowing the richness and gifts of the Church, a place of grace, fraternity, and love.

As a result, despite their healthy and holy desires, while they sincerely seek ways to climb the exciting upward paths to life and abundant joy, many end up relying on false footholds that are unable to support the weight of their deepest needs and cause them to slip back down, away from God, shipwrecked on a sea of worldly concerns.

Among them are fathers and mothers, children, young people and adolescents, who find themselves at times alienated by illusory lifestyles that leave no room for faith, and whose spread is facilitated by the wrong use of potentially good means – such as social media – yet prove harmful when used to convey misleading messages.

What drives the Church in her pastoral and missionary outreach is precisely the desire to go out as a “fisher” of humanity, in order to save it from the waters of evil and death through an encounter with Christ.

Perhaps many young people today who choose cohabitation instead of Christian marriage in reality need someone to show them in a concrete and clear way, especially by the example of their lives, what the gift of sacramental grace is and what strength derives from it.  Someone to help them understand “the beauty and grandeur of the vocation to love and the service of life” that God gives to married couples (SAINT JOHN PAUL II, Familiaris Consortio, 1).

Similarly, many parents, in raising their children in the faith, feel the need for communities that can support them in creating the right conditions for their children to encounter Jesus, “places where the communion of love, which finds its ultimate source in God, takes place” (FRANCIS, General Audience, 9 September 2015).

Faith is primarily a response to God’s love, and the greatest mistake we can make as Christians is, in the words of Saint Augustine, “to claim that Christ’s grace consists in his example and not in the gift of his person” (Contra Iulianum opus imperfectum, II, 146).  How often, even in the not too distant past, have we forgotten this truth and presented Christian life mostly as a set of rules to be kept, replacing the marvelous experience of encountering Jesus – God who gives himself to us – with a moralistic, burdensome and unappealing religion that, in some ways, is impossible to live in concrete daily life.

In this situation, it is the responsibility of the Bishops, as successors of the apostles and shepherds of Christ’s flock, to be the first to cast their nets into the sea and become “fishers of families.”  Yet the laity are also called to participate in this mission, and to become, alongside ordained ministers, “fishers” of couples, young people, children, women and men of all ages and circumstances, so that all may encounter the one Saviour.  Through Baptism, each one of us has been made a priest, king, and prophet for our brothers and sisters, and a “living stone” (cf. 1 Pet 2:4) for the building up of God’s house “in fraternal communion, in the harmony of the Spirit, in the coexistence of diversity” (LEO XIV, Homily, 18 May 2025).

I ask you, then, to join in the work of the whole Church in seeking out those families who no longer come to us, in learning how to walk with them and to help them embrace the faith and become in turn “fishers” of other families.

Do not be discouraged by the difficult situations you face.  It is true that families today have many problems, but “the Gospel of the family also nourishes seeds that are still waiting to grow, and serves as the basis for caring for those plants that are wilting and must not be neglected” (FRANCIS, Amoris Laetitia, 76).

What great need there is to promote an encounter with God, whose tender love values and loves the story of every person!  It is not a matter of giving hasty answers to difficult questions, but of drawing close to people, listening to them, and trying to understand together with them how to face their difficulties.  And this requires a readiness to be open, when necessary, to new ways of seeing things and different ways of acting, for each generation is different and has its own challenges, dreams and questions.  Yet amid all these changes, Jesus Christ remains “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8).  Consequently, if we want to help families experience joyful paths of communion and be seeds of faith for one another, we must first cultivate and renew our own identity as believers.

Dear brothers and sisters, thank you for what you do!  May the Holy Spirit guide you in discerning criteria and methods that support and promote the Church’s efforts to minister to families.  Let us help families to listen courageously to Christ’s proposal and the Church’s words of encouragement!  I will remember you in my prayers, and I cordially impart to all of you my Apostolic Blessing.

From the Vatican, 28 May 2025