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Within four days, cardinals and bishops from around the world will sit down with Leo XIV in the Vatican to talk about the family in the light of Amoris Laetitia.
The official call speaks of “synodal discernment” and “reciprocal listening”, but the payroll of guests that the Pope has added from his fist and letter to the participants of office says something more precise.
Cupich, McElroy, Tobin, Cobo, Hollerich, Fernández, Tagle, David: all the names that marked the agenda of the previous pontificate in the matrimonial question are.
None of those who discussed it have been called.
An encounter “not a synod”
Leo XIV announced the appointment on March 19, the feast of St. Joseph and the tenth anniversary of the exhortation, through a message in which he convened the presidents of the Episcopal conferences around the world and the heads of the Eastern Catholic Churches to “proceed, in reciprocal listening, to a synodal discernment about the steps to be taken to proclaim the Gospel to the families today.”
The format recalls that of the February 2019 Abuse Summit, with which Francis gathered in Rome the heads of the episcopates of the five continents.
The Press Room published on July 6 the thematic itinerary prepared by the General Secretariat of the Synod and the Dicastery for the Laity, the Family and Life. Five blocks order the work: the reality of the families today, the young people and the marriage vocation, the first years of marriage, the family as an evangelizing subject and the accompaniment of those who have lived “suffering, abandonment, separation and divorce”.
This last epigraph, the only one who touches the nerve of the eighth chapter of the exhortation, is the one who has aroused the expectation of some and the restlessness of others.
According to the program presented this Friday in the Press Room, the work will be held behind closed doors in the Paul VI Classroom, with about 190 participants: the presidents of the 115 Episcopal conferences, the heads of the Eastern Churches, eleven marriages from the five continents and about thirty experts and moderators. The Pope will be present only at the opening of 7 and at the closing of 14.
The participants of trade are, therefore, the presidents of episcopal conferences, with the plurality that this implies: African, Polish, Hungarian or Central European episcopates who once received Amoris laetitia with caution or with public reserves. To that assembly the Pope has added twenty-two personal guests, and it is on that payroll, chosen name in name from Santa Marta, where the direction that Rome wants to give to the meeting is guessed.
Ten years of an open wound
Amoris laetitia, signed by Francis on March 19, 2016 after the two synods on the family of 2014 and 2015, is the most discussed pontifical document of the last half century. The controversy is concentrated in a handful of paragraphs and, above all, in a footnote, the 351, which opens the door to the sacramental communion of the divorced and civilly remarried in “certain cases”, after a process of discernment in the internal jurisdiction.
The reception was immediately contradictory. The bishops of the Buenos Aires region drafted in September 2016 some criteria that admitted that communion, and Francis endorsed them by letter saying that “there are no other interpretations”.
Episcopates like the Polish or dioceses like Philadelphia, with Chaput at the forefront, maintained the discipline of Familiaris consortio: access to communion only for those who commit to live as brothers. Germany, Malta and much of the Central European Church embraced the most open reading.
In September 2016 four cardinals, Burke, Brandmüller, Caffarra and Meisner, presented Pope five dubiadubias with the compatibility of the exhortation with the previous magisterium. They never received a response. Two of them died waiting for her.
In 2023 a second group, headed again by Burke and with Sarah, Zen, Sandoval and Brandmüller, repeated the operation on the eve of the Synod on synodality and obtained a response from Francis himself and the newly appointed prefect of Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, had the editor of the controversial eighth chapter.
Weeks later, on December 18, 2023, Fernandez himself signed Fiducia supplicans, the declaration that allows to bless couples in an irregular situation and same-sex couples, and that entire Africa rejected en bloc.
With the election of Leo XIV, much of the episcopate expected the new pontificate to put order in this diversity of practices. There are those who read the October call as the occasion to do so. Some fear that it will serve to consolidate, with the seal of “synodality”, which until now was an interpretation among several.
The Pope's guests
The official list of participants includes under the heading “Invitati” twenty-two prelates who do not participate on the basis of their office but by pontifical designation. The reading of the American and European bloc leaves no room for doubt.
Three cardinals and one bishop attend the United States. Blase Cupich, archbishop of Chicago, was the great promoter of Amoris laetitia in the American episcopate and the first to claim that the conscience of the divorced and remarried could lead them to communion. Robert McElroy, today in Washington, defended from San Diego the same thesis and extended it to homosexual couples in a famous 2023 article in which he called for a “radical inclusion”.
Joseph Tobin, Archbishop of Newark, is the third vertex of the same triangle, welcoming pilgrimages from gay Catholics in its cathedral. Daniel Flores, Bishop of Brownsville and strongman of the Synod on synodality in the United States, completes the delegation.
For Europe, Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, Jesuit and general rapporteur of the Synod on Synodality, has openly called for a review of the doctrine on homosexuality. And for Spain, Cardinal José Cobo, archbishop of Madrid and vice president of the Episcopal Conference, who will sit next to Monsignor Argüello, present by office as president. That the Pope loves Cobo in the room outside his office, when Spain already has a voice assured, it is itself an indication of who Rome listens to in the Spanish episcopate.
Cardinal Fernández, prefect of the Doctrine of the Faith and material author of the text that is celebrated, and Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, pro-prefect of Evangelization, who in 2016 called for an application of the exhortation “on a case-by-case basis”. From the Philippines comes Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David, bishop of Kalookan, and from Canada Cardinal Gérald Lacroix, of Quebec, with Bishop Joseph Dabrowski.
The rest of the payroll brings together less marked profiles: Giuseppe Baturi, general secretary of the Italian Bishops’ Conference; Cardinal Ignace Bessi Dogbo, from Abidjan; Cardinal Protase Rugambwa, from Tabora; Bishops Jean Bondu (France), Jaime Calderón (Zacatecas), Robert Llanos (Antigua and Barbuda), Peter Machado (Vasai), None of them have ever stood out for discussing the exhortation.
Those who are not, and the two bishops of Beijing
As eloquent as the list is its reverse. Not a single signer of the 2016 or 2023 dubia has been called: neither Burke, nor Brandmüller, nor Sarah, nor Zen. Neither Cardinal Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Doctrine of the Faith when the exhortation and persistent critic of its application was published, nor Charles Chaput, whose Philadelphia guidelines were the most articulated counterweight to those of Buenos Aires.
No European in the profile of Péter Erdő, general rapporteur of the family synods and defender of traditional discipline, is among the personal guests. If plurality exists in the classroom, it will be provided by the presidents of conferences in their own right, never at the will of the person who has made the list.
The other fact that comes into view is the presence of two bishops of the People’s Republic of China: Giuseppe Huang Bingzhang, bishop of Shantou, ordained without a pontifical mandate in 2011, excommunicated and reconciled in 2018 in the heat of the provisional agreement with Beijing, and Matteo Zhen Xuebin, bishop of Beijing, elected in accordance with the mechanisms of that same agreement.
His pastoral contribution to a debate about the family is difficult to imagine in a country that for four decades imposed the only child and where the Church operates under the watch of the Patriotic Association. His invitation speaks less of Amoris laetitia than of the continuity of the Chinese policy of the previous pontificate, renewed by Leo XIV without visible alterations.
The list as a message
In Rome, calls are read before speeches. Francis ruled for twelve years at the stroke of appointments and invitations, and who knew the payroll of a synod already knew his final document.
Leo XIV, who has cultivated since May 2025 an image of serene, institutional and unfriendly pontiff of internal wars, has just signed with this list his first unequivocal position on the most divisive issue inherited from his predecessor.
To fix position on footnote 351 has been enough to decide who sits at the table.
The meeting is presented as a listening exercise.