Cardinal Fernández’s Marriage Document: Healing Divisions or Creating New Ones?

Why Una Caro inspires hope, provokes anxiety, and raises fresh questions about Cardinal Fernández’s doctrinal leadership.

When the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published Una Caro on 25 November 2025 it did so with a deliberate, almost pastoral tone. The note, fifty pages in its Italian edition, is an extended meditation on the meaning of monogamy understood as the “exclusive union and mutual belonging” of one man and one woman. It sets out to do something rather modest and, at least at first glance, rather traditional: retrieve and amplify resources from Scripture, the Fathers, medieval and modern moralists, philosophers and even poets in order to show why a conjugal union ordered to mutual belonging is not merely a social convention but a shape of human flourishing rooted in revelation and reason. The line is plain: monogamy is to be praised, taught and defended; the unity of marriage is an essential property of the sacrament and of human marriage. The note restricts itself to unity alone, a deliberately narrow scope that avoids restating the Church’s comprehensive doctrine on marriage.

Why? A reasonable speculative explanation is that the dicastery chose to limit itself to unity because it wanted to respond quickly and pastorally to the specific questions raised by African bishops about polygamy without reopening the entire doctrinal corpus on marriage, which would have required a far more extensive, authoritative and contentious treatment. It may also reflect Cardinal Fernández’s preference for thematic, affective documents that develop one pastoral emphasis at a time rather than issuing comprehensive doctrinal syntheses.

Irrespective of the reasons, this framing explains much of the note’s content and tone. A major pastoral motive behind the publication is explicit: the dicastery took pains to note conversations with African bishops concerned about polygamy and to acknowledge the new pressures that plural unions place on communities, especially the dignity and protection of women. In this sense Una Caro reads in part as a concrete answer to particular episcopal concerns and not simply as a euro-centric exercise in abstract moral theory. Reporting in the press underlines that pastoral purpose.