As bishops from around the world gather in Rome at the invitation of Pope Leo XIV to discuss marriage and the family, J.P. De Gance has been working behind the scenes.
His organization, Communio, produced a report examining the state of marriage in the United States, ten years after Pope Francis published Amoris Laetitia, his landmark document on marriage and family life.
The findings are striking. According to De Gance, the rate of Catholic sacramental marriages in the United States has fallen dramatically since 1970, measured against the baptized Catholic population. Yet he says 82% of Catholic parishes spend nothing on marriage ministry.
De Gance believes the Church has devoted considerable attention and resources to priestly vocations while neglecting the vocation from which so many priests emerge: marriage.
In this week’s episode, he explains what he has learned from conversations with bishops from around the world, and why he believes the crisis of marriage may be one of the principal causes of declining religious practice.
He also discusses whether Amoris Laetitia has made a difference at the parish level, the tension between Pope Francis’s language of accompaniment and his own emphasis on spiritual warfare, and what the bishops gathering in Rome can realistically accomplish.
In this episode:
Why Communio prepared a report ahead of the Vatican meeting
What the research reveals about the dramatic decline of Catholic marriage in America
Why De Gance believes the collapse of marriage is contributing to the decline of religious faith
Why so many Catholic parishes devote little or no resources to marriage ministry
What bishops from other countries are telling him about the global marriage crisis
Whether Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia changed how the Church approaches marriage
What Pope Leo XIV’s gathering of bishops might achieve
De Gance’s larger argument is that the Church cannot reverse its decline without taking marriage seriously—not simply as a moral teaching to defend, but as a vocation to cultivate and support.
And despite the statistics, he remains optimistic. His experience working with churches across the United States has convinced him that strengthening marriages is possible, provided the Church is willing to make it a genuine pastoral priority.