LGBTQ+ Issues Need to Be Included in Pope Leo’s Summit on ‘Amoris Laetitia’

Pope Leo XIV announced that he will be inviting the Presidents of all the bishops’ conferences around the globe to a summit meeting in Rome in October 2026 to synodally discuss Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis’ 2016 apostolic exhortation in response to the 2014 and 2015 synods on the family.

Pope Leo XIV

The pope made the announcement on March 19th, the tenth anniversary of Amoris, which Crux news ervice referred to as Pope Francis’ “lighting-rod document on family life that was a watershed in his pontificate.”  In announcing the summit, Pope Leo remarked:

“Our era is marked by rapid changes which make it necessary, even more than ten years ago, to give particular pastoral attention to families, to whom the Lord entrusts the task of participating in the Church’s mission of proclaiming and witnessing to the Gospel.”

At the time of its publication and in the following years, much has been written about the Amoris‘ footnote 351 which Crux said “opened a cautious door for divorced and remarried couples to receive communion.” But it was also controversial because of its comments about LGBTQ+ issues, some of which were seen as positive for LGBTQ+ people, and some were seen as negative.

For example, on same-gender partnerships, the document’s paragraph 52 stated: “We need to acknowledge the great variety of family situations that can offer a certain stability, but de facto or same-sex unions, for example, may not simply be equated with marriage.”

While the negative element of this statement was the repetition of  the well-known ban on referring to committed same-gender relationships as “marriage,” the positive part was the acknowledgement that diverse family arrangements offer “stability,” a precursor to Pope Francis’ 2020 support for civil unions.

The document ‘s paragraph 56 disparaged transgender people by stating “biological sex and the socio-cultural role of sex (gender) can be distinguished but not separated.” This negative idea was reinforced in paragaph 258 by stating “. . . [T]he young need to be helped to accept their own body as it was created, for thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation… An appreciation of our body as male or female is also necessary for our own self-awareness in an encounter with others different from ourselves. In this way we can joyfully accept the specific gifts of another man or woman, the work of God the Creator, and find mutual enrichment.  Only by losing the fear of being different, can we be freed of self-centredness and self-absorption. Sex education should help young people to accept their own bodies and to avoid the pretension to cancel out sexual difference because one no longer knows how to deal with it.”

On the positive side, the document called for greater ministry to families with lesbian and gay members (paragraph 250), but this call was included in a section labelled “Casting Light on Crises, Worries and Difficulties,” implying that such families always had negative experiences due to LGBTQ+ issues.  And paragraph 251 repeated the false claim that international aid to developing nations is dependent upon openness to marriage equality.

Amoris Laetitia LGBTQ+ ministry issues in several positive ways: a strong endorsement of the primacy of conscience (paragraph 303); a warning against using natural law theory as a weapon which sees “everything is black and white” because that leads pastoral minister to “sometimes close off the way of grace and of growth, and discourage paths of sanctification which give glory to God” (paragraph 305); an encouragement to pastoral ministers and church leaders to dialogue with those whose ideas differ from church teaching (paragraphs 138 and 139).

One sentence of the document somewhat encapsulates what is a key point of Pope Francis’ legacy. He told church leaders to  “Keep an open mind. Don’t get bogged down in your own limited ideas and opinions, but be prepared to change or expand them” (139).

To read all of the excerpts from Amoris Laetitia which refer to or are applicable to LGBTQ+ ministry, click here. 

To read New Ways Ministry’s response to the document in 2016, click here.

To read all of Bondings 2.0’s news and commentary posts about Amoris Laetitia, click here.

A re-evaluation of Amoris Laetitia is definitely needed.  Pope Leo is correct that there has been rapid change in the last 10 years, not least of which is that the conversation about LGBTQ+ issues in the church has changed greatly. This change is due primarily to the latter years of Pope Francis’ leadership. In particular the Synod on Syondality raised up the voices of the global church who were calling for new approaches to LGBTQ+ issues. This summit must include discussions of LGBTQ+ topics, with an eye toward developing further the greater openness that Pope Francis initiated.

At the end of the document announcing the summit, Pope Leo stated: “There are, in fact, places and circumstances in which the Church ‘can become the salt of the earth’ only through the lay faithful and, in particular, through families.”  He is certainly correct there.  And that is the best argument that this summit should include more than just presidents of bishops’ conferences.  For an effective update of  Amoris Laetitia, lay people, and in particular LGBTQ+ people, should be included in the discussions since, as the pope acknowledges, their perspective is invaluable.

—Francis DeBernardo, New Ways Ministry, March 20, 2026