Marriage & Family Life

While several Western European bishops praised the Dec. 18 declaration of the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on blessing same-sex couples as “a major breakthrough in pastoral care,” reactions elsewhere have been mixed, with African bishops offering explainers for “confused” faithful or banning same-sex blessings.

A pro-family campaign group has warned that a proposed March referendum in Ireland to amend the country’s constitution would be a “further downgrading of the importance of marriage to society.”

The American public’s views of the family are “complicated” and becoming “more pessimistic than optimistic about the institution of marriage and the family,” according to a new report from Pew Research Center.

Participants of the Marriage Catechumenate Summit gathered at a retreat center near Houston to unpack the contents of “Catechumenal Pathways for Married Life,” a pastoral tool prepared by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life.

This “marriage catechumenate” model is an effort to return to the early church’s approach to forming adults to be received into the church.

A recent analysis shows 25 percent of 40-year-olds in the U.S. have never been married — a record high — and may indicate “the closing of the American heart,” according to W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia and director of the National Marriage Project.

The forthcoming 16th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops — otherwise known as the Synod on Synodality, which Pope Francis convenes in Rome this October — will examine ways to accompany divorced and remarried Catholics.