Sister Alford at Amoris Laetitia meeting: ‘Encourage young people to take up the great challenge of marriage and family life’
October 09, 2026
In the first meditation delivered at the extraordinary Vatican meeting devoted to Amoris Laetitia, Sister Helen Alford, O.P., encouraged the assembled prelates to “search for ways to encourage young people to take up the great challenge of marriage and family life, embracing it in the full knowledge that they will experience great fragility as part of the process of realizing its beauty, and that in that fragility, they will find new and unexpected sources of God’s grace and experience a desire for holiness that is their very own.”
“Let us join Jesus in calling them to rise to the challenge, like Jesus called the Samaritan woman, of proclaiming the Gospel to others, precisely in the recognition of their fragility, so as to call others to join them in trusting in God’s grace and in experiencing the Christian desire for holiness,” the president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences said on the evening of October 7.
Sister Alford offered “some questions that may help us enter into the shared reflections of the days ahead: Where and how can we recognize God already at work in the lives of families? What can we learn from families, in their beauty and their fragility? How can we proclaim the Gospel not only to families, but also with them, encouraging them to proclaim actively the Gospel of the family?”
Sister Alford asked her questions at the conclusion of a meditation with three main parts:
- Proclaiming the Gospel of, and to, the Family
- Jesus meets the Samaritan Woman
- Familiaris Consortio and Amoris Laetitia
In discussing Familiaris Consortio—Pope St. John Paul II’s 1981 apostolic exhortation on the Christian family—and Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia, Sister Alford said that “when social situations are turbulent and changing quickly, it can be necessary to find new ways of putting together both the ‘objective demands of the law’ (AL 295) and the ‘law of gradualness’ (FC 34) that many experience in trying to enter into it. Both Familiaris Consortio and Amoris Laetitia try to do this in their different historical contexts.”
“Let us not forget that St Thomas Aquinas and all the tradition that goes back to him would say that the Law of God reaches its greatest expression in the New Law, the Law of the Gospel: the Grace of Jesus,” she added. “In this sense, the last chapter of Amoris Laetitia which focuses on the spirituality of marriage, ‘a spirituality of supernatural communion,’ is so significant because it places marriage within the call to sanctity, the goal of every Christian life.”
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