‘Amoris Laetitia’ is consistent with Church teaching, sister tells pope and bishops

VATICAN CITY — Amoris Laetitia , Pope Francis’ 2016 apostolic exhortation on the family, is consistent with the Church teaching and practice that came before it, Sister Helen Alford, OP, said at the opening of a Vatican meeting about the papal document on Wednesday.

Like an earlier document on the family by St. John Paul II, Amoris Laetitia was an innovative response to the challenge of following the moral law “when social situations are turbulent and changing quickly,” Alford said.

Amoris Laetitia sparked intense debate following its publication in 2016, especially after the bishops of the Buenos Aires Pastoral Region interpreted it as allowing, following a process of accompanied pastoral discernment, access to the sacraments of reconciliation and the Eucharist for some Catholics who are divorced and civilly remarried “when a person judges that he or she would fall into a further fault by harming the children of the new union.”

In 2023, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith confirmed that this interpretation forms part of the authentic magisterium after being incorporated into the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, the Holy See’s official bulletin.

Earlier this year, Pope Leo…