Originally published at The Crux
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Participants in the 10th anniversary gathering of senior Church leaders, experts, families and facilitators to discuss and assess reception of Pope Francis’s seminal – and highly controversial – exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, continued in Rome as the week opened.
“Life’s difficulties: accompanying and supporting” was the specific theme of the day on Monday, one of five themes chosen for the working days of the weeklong series of sessions that began last Wednesday with a public session and has proceeded behind closed doors.
Heading into the meeting, the president of the bishops’ conference of Indonesia shared with Crux Now some of the challenges facing Catholics in his country.
Familiar challenges
“In Indonesia,” Bishop Antonius Subianto of Bandung said, “families face divorce, migration, interfaith marriages, single-parent households, economic insecurity, and changing attitudes among young people.”
“We have begun developing a more welcoming pastoral approach,” he said, “but we still have a long way to go.”
Subianto told Crux Now of one urgent challenge facing the bishops: Helping “young people to rediscover the beauty of Christian marriage as God’s call to love and holiness.”
“Many desire authentic love but hesitate to make lifelong commitments because they have witnessed broken marriages, domestic violence, infidelity,
