Pope Leo again promotes marriage and family life – this time in a gathering with young people in Uruguay
On November 7, Pope Leo XIV addressed an estimated 70,000 people at a candlelight vigil in Montevideo’s Centenario Stadium, the centerpiece of his first visit to South America. Amid a broader call to holiness, he turned directly to the vocation of marriage and family, telling the young people gathered: “Dare to take the step of marrying and starting a family yourselves. Don’t be afraid of ‘forever.’”
He went further still, addressing married couples in the crowd: “Open your home to life, even when the world tells you that a child is a burden.”
The exhortation was not incidental. Uruguay is among the most secularized nations in Latin America, and the region as a whole has seen fertility collapse from nearly six children per woman in the 1950s to around 1.8 today, alongside a steep decline in Catholic self-identification.
The Pope named that drift explicitly, warning the crowd that “when we try to build a world without God, we run the risk of leaving humanity without a place as well.” His remarks linked the retreat from faith and the retreat from marriage and children, framing both as symptoms of the same loss of hope in a future worth committing to.
Data from other Countries
His timing lines up closely with a run of research and commentary on the same question out of the United States this year.
Census data reported in February showed married couples now make up just 47% of U.S. households, down from 66% fifty years ago, while Catholic weddings have fallen nearly 60% since 2000 and roughly 75% since 1970.
Patrick T. Brown of the Ethics and Public Policy Center read the numbers as evidence that “America is getting older and more lonely,” and Julia Dezelski of the USCCB’s Secretariat of Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth called for “significant, incisive action within the Church and in wider society” to reverse a trend she warned is already unsustainable for parishes, schools, and families alike (Catholic Review, Feb. 9, 2026).
A separate thread of reporting has focused on young men specifically.
- The Washington Times surveyed analysts in September on the social and economic pressures pushing men away from marriage, from the cost of supporting a family to a shrinking sense that marriage is expected of them (Washington Times, Sept. 7, 2026).
- Writing days earlier for the Institute for Family Studies, sociologist Joseph E. Davis argued that this retreat is less a rejection of commitment than a symptom of an “individualist ethic” that leaves young men without a community or role worth sacrificing for; tellingly, 85% still agree that being a man requires sacrificing for others, and roughly three in four still rank providing for a family as central to adulthood (Institute for Family Studies, Sept. 1, 2026).
The Task for Marriage Formators
For those in marriage formation ministry, the Pope’s choice of language is worth further reflection.
“Forever” is precisely the word that stops many young adults from dating with intention in the first place, not because they have rejected marriage, but because permanence itself has come to feel unreasonable, even reckless, in an uncertain world.
Research from the Wheatley Institute’s State of Our Unions 2026: The Dating Recession bears this out closer to home: based on a nationally representative survey of over 5,000 unmarried U.S. adults aged 22–35, only about one in three is actively dating, even though 86% still expect to marry someday. The gap between that hope and that hesitation is the terrain in which formation ministers are increasingly called to work.
Pope Leo’s words from Montevideo add a pastoral voice to that same conviction: the task before marriage ministers is not to talk young adults out of their fear of “forever,” but to show them a love strong enough to make permanence make sense again.
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