Leo XIV: Fornicators Get Accompaniment. Trads Get Shown the Door.

Cohabitation is met with smiles and compassion. The Latin Mass? With locked doors and lectures.

This past week, Leo XIV offered his clearest remarks to date on cohabitation. Addressing a seminar hosted by the Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life on May 28, he reflected on how the Church might better evangelize families in a culture drifting ever further from sacramental marriage. Conservative outlets have been quick to herald his words as a rebuke of Amoris Laetitia, a veiled correction of Francis’s open-armed posture toward cohabiting couples.

They’re half right.

Leo’s comments do mark a tonal shift. He does not praise cohabitation. He does not speak of “elements of grace” or “seeds of the Word” in these unions. He does not suggest that fidelity alone makes a couple “truly married in God’s eyes.” Instead, he speaks of cohabiting couples as needing help to see what they’re missing: the beauty of sacramental marriage, the strength that comes from grace, the grandeur of a vocation rightly lived.

“Perhaps many young people today who choose cohabitation instead of Christian marriage in reality need someone to show them in a concrete and clear way, especially by the example of their lives, what the gift of sacramental grace is and what strength derives from it.”

There’s no endorsement here. There’s no celebration of ambiguity. This is not Francis declaring that “where there is fidelity, there is the grace of a true marriage.” This is not Amoris Laetitia §78, praising the “notable stability” and “deep affection” of unions built outside the sacrament. Leo refrains from such theological speculation. And for that, he deserves credit.

What’s Missing? Moral Clarity

But what’s missing is precisely what is most needed: a clear statement that cohabitation is not merely inferior to marriage. It is objectively sinful.

Leo implies that cohabiting couples are sincere but poorly formed. He describes their situation as one of deficiency, not disorder. He portrays cohabitation as less than ideal, but not as morally wrong. And that is a problem.

A Church that truly believes in sin must call it what it is; not just offer a better alternative. In Leo’s address, we hear that sacramental marriage is beautiful, that it imparts strength, that it elevates the vocation to love. All true. But what about cohabitation itself? Is it a breach of God’s law? Is it an occasion of grave sin? Is it a scandal to others, especially when it involves reception of the sacraments? None of this is said.

The Prophetic Warning They Still Won’t Heed

Archbishop Lefebvre saw this collapse long before it was fashionable to mourn it. In An Open Letter to Confused Catholics (1986), he described how the Church’s toleration of pseudo-marriages and soft treatment of cohabitation would lead to a generation of Catholics who no longer knew what marriage was, or cared.

His warning has lost none of its urgency:

“As for the so-called married couple, they can always say they have been to church and doubtless they will end up by believing their situation to be regular by dint of seeing their friends follow the same path. Misguided Catholics will wonder if it is not better than nothing. Indifference takes over; they become willing to accept any arrangement, from a simple registry-office wedding to juvenile cohabitation (in respect of which so many parents want to show themselves to be ‘understanding’), and finally through to free unions. Total de-christianization lies ahead; the couples each lack the graces which come from the sacrament of marriage in order to bring up their children, if at least they agree to have any. The breakdowns in these unsanctified households have increased to such an extent as to worry the Council of Economic and Social Affairs, of which a recent report shows that even a secular society is aware that it is heading for ruin as a result of the instability of these families or pseudo-families.”

This is the fruit of pastoral ambiguity. When cohabitation is not condemned, it is assumed to be tolerable. When priests are afraid to speak of sin, the faithful begin to forget what grace even is. And when the Church trades clarity for compassion, the next generation inherits only confusion and chaos.

Leo XIV may have improved the tone. But he has not changed the script.

Accompaniment Without Repentance

Instead, Leo frames the issue pedagogically, not morally. Cohabiting couples are not warned; they are invited. Their choices are not rebuked; they are recontextualized. The remedy is not confession and conversion, but example and encouragement.

This is the hallmark of post-Vatican II pastoralism: never condemn, only accompany. Never speak of guilt, only of longing. And while Leo refrains from affirming Francis’s more radical suggestions, such as the presence of grace in non-sacramental unions, he does not retract them either. He sidesteps them. He politely ignores them. The ambiguity remains.

When Cohabitation Is Tolerated but Tradition Is Punished

There’s a bitter irony at the heart of Leo XIV’s approach, and indeed of the entire post-Vatican II Church. Cohabiting couples are treated with pastoral patience, tenderness, and understanding. They are accompanied. Their irregular situation is seen as a deficiency in formation, not a rupture in grace. No one dares speak of sin. No one refuses them blessings.

But faithful Catholics who simply ask to attend the Mass of their grandparents, the Roman Rite canonized by centuries of saints. are met with suspicion. They are regulated, not accompanied. Their desire for the traditional liturgy is treated as divisive, even dangerous. They are asked to justify themselves, explain themselves, or simply go away.

What kind of Church bends over backwards to affirm couples living in fornication, but reserves its harshest discipline for those trying to worship as the saints did?

Still Missing the Mark

Once again, the appearance of moral correction turns out to be just a more refined form of accommodation. The modern Church still refuses to speak with the clarity of her saints and doctors. Leo invokes the beauty of marriage, but never its exclusivity. He calls for witness, but not for repentance.

We should be thankful that Leo did not double down on the errors of his predecessor. But we should not pretend that he has undone them either. The Church does not need soft rebalancing. It needs unflinching truth.

In the era of Leo XIV, the cohabiting couple is still not told that what they are doing offends God.

They are simply told they’re missing out on something better.

And that, however gentler it may sound, is not the Gospel.