An elderly woman arrives seeking help. She is going through a very vulnerable family situation and has taken care of her grandchildren.

She needs answers. But she also needs something earlier: someone to listen to her.

The situation requires legal intervention that goes beyond what a family support program can address. Other resources must be explored, coordination is needed, and those who can help must be identified. Ultimately, progress can be made toward a solution that protects the children and guarantees their fundamental rights.

The story took place at the Family Counseling Center of the Diocese of San Martín, in Argentina. Those involved in the situation drew a simple conclusion: the Counseling Center doesn’t exist because it can solve all problems. It exists because no one should have to go through an overwhelming situation alone.

Perhaps that little story helps to understand a much bigger question that the Church is asking itself again ten years after Amoris Laetitia.

Ten years later

From October 7 to 14, Leo XIV gathered at the Vatican leaders of Churches from around the world to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Amoris Laetitia and to consider how to proclaim the Gospel to and with families today.

The meeting proposes to listen again to what is happening in families and to look at the accompaniment experiences that already exist in local Churches.

There is a continuity here that deserves to be examined. In Amoris Laetitia, Francis proposed drawing closer to royal families, with their joys, difficulties, frailties, and hopes. Ten years later, Leo XIV took up that concern again in a world undergoing new changes.

In Magnifica Humanitas, he once again places the person at the center. Faced with the growth of artificial intelligence and technology capable of performing ever more tasks, the question ceases to be merely what machines can do and returns to what remains irreplaceably human: the capacity to love, to form bonds, to exercise freedom, to seek the truth, and to open oneself to others and to God.

And it is precisely within the family where many of these bonds begin to be learned and built.

The question then is not only what we have to say to families. We must also ask ourselves: do we know how to listen to them?

Families listening to families

In the Diocese of San Martín, located in the province of Buenos Aires, Republic of Argentina, there is an experience that for decades has been trying to give a concrete answer to that challenge: Family Counseling.

This is a free service offered by the Catholic Church, open to everyone, in which trained families support and listen to other families. The counselors receive ongoing training every month and, every two years, an intensive training seminar. They also work as a team and have professional and pastoral interdisciplinary support.

It could be summed up in a simple expression: families listening to families.

Those who arrive don’t find ready-made answers or someone to tell them what to do. They find a place to stop, talk, be heard, and begin to see their situation in a different light.

Because listening doesn’t just mean hearing. It involves making space for the other person, trying to suspend judgments, prejudices, and the need to quickly find a solution.

And often the task consists of something even more difficult: helping a family to listen to each other again.

Conflicts don’t arise solely from differing opinions. Sometimes anger, pain, or fear cause us to stop listening to those around us. In such cases, offering support can mean helping to rebuild a bridge that seemed broken.

Rebuilding ties

Perhaps Amoris Laetitia and Magnifica Humanitas can be found here.

If Francis invited us to approach the concrete reality of families, Leo XIV reminds us once again of the irreplaceable value of the person and his relationships.

Technology can facilitate communication, provide information, and even help us solve problems. But it cannot love, forgive, embrace, or rebuild a bond on its own.

The pastoral materials developed from Magnifica Humanitas also insist on avoiding abstract models of the “ideal family” in order to look at the concrete human group, with its questions, circumstances and difficulties.

And there a mission emerges that is profoundly relevant for the Church: to help restore bonds and rebuild networks.

Not from the pretense of having all the solutions, but from a place of empathy. Listening to those who have been left alone. Helping two people to listen to each other again. Collaborating with professionals when the problem requires other expertise. Reconnecting a person with a community capable of supporting them.

Consulting services also recognize their limitations. They do not replace therapy, medical or psychological care, or legal or social intervention. When other expertise is needed, providing support also means knowing when to refer.

Recognizing the limit does not mean abandoning the other person.

To accompany life as it comes

Families continue to face difficulties in communication and coexistence, but also conflictive separations, violence, addictions, grief, problems between parents and children, and a loneliness that can exist even when surrounded by people.

It wasn’t just the family that changed. It changed the world in which families try to live.

That is why an expression that arose from those who accompany them every day is especially significant: “to accompany life as it comes.”

Family counseling explains it differently: we can’t simply support the family we imagine or the one we think it should be. It’s about accepting reality as it is and supporting it with closeness, listening, mercy, and discernment.

That does not mean renouncing the Gospel or ceasing to propose a path.

It means recognizing that before we can accompany someone on their story, we need to understand it. Before responding, we need to listen. And before trying to rebuild a family from the outside, we need to help its members find each other again.

Ten years after Amoris Laetitia, perhaps the question is not only how much the family has changed. We should also ask ourselves how much our approach to it has changed.

Francis opened a path of closeness to individual families. Leo XIV placed back at the center that which no progress can replace: the dignity of each person and their capacity to relate, love, and build community.

In an increasingly connected and, paradoxically, often more lonely society, the Church has a profoundly human mission: to listen, to accompany, to rebuild bonds and to help reconstruct the networks that remind us that no one is called to walk alone.

Because, once again, the answer lies not in machines, but in the heart of each person: in their ability to listen, to look with empathy at the other and to find each other again.