The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published on October 22, 2026 the document Venite ad me. Considerations on the Transmission of the Faith in an Age of Change, approved by Leo XIV on August 21 and signed by Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández and Monsignor Armando Matteo, secretary of the Dicastery. It is presented as a text of pastoral reflection, not as a doctrinal note, with eight chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. Its stated aim is to suggest concrete paths for the proclamation of the kerygma at a time when, according to the text itself, in some regions “the transmission of the faith has almost completely broken down”.
The central diagnosis occupies the chapter on the crisis of the transmission of the faith. The document acknowledges that the intergenerational mechanism that for centuries made the family the first and most essential place of that transmission no longer operates. In the West, fewer and fewer parents baptize their children or teach them to pray; in Eastern Europe, entire generations were silenced under communist regimes; in Latin America the organic continuity between family, school and ecclesial community has been broken; in Asia and Africa specific factors appear—career priority, religious competition, superficial faith—that produce the same result: a generation that does not receive what the previous one did not know or could not pass on. Having received the sacraments or attended catechesis no longer guarantees a personal and lasting faith. The text therefore calls for abandoning a pastoral approach centered almost exclusively on children and adolescents and turning decisively also to the evangelization of adults. This rupture is not a marginal phenomenon; it is the most serious sign of the change of epoch that the document seeks to address.
This rupture is inserted into what the document calls “a new widespread culture.” It describes an individualism that privatizes faith, exalts the sovereignty of the self and reduces the Gospel to a private and optional matter. Digital culture intensifies the phenomenon, generating a culture of immediacy and hyperstimulation that breeds fatigue, boredom and apathy toward the effort required to seek the truth.
Regarding artificial intelligence, the text echoes Leo XIV’s statement that the challenge is not technological but anthropological. AI interferes not only in information ecosystems but in the deepest human relationships, simulating voices, empathy and wisdom, and opens the risk of a “tailor-made,” disembodied faith colonized by noisy minorities. The document warns that these technologies redesign space, time and authority and that the risk of a proposal of faith dissociated from concrete life is real.
In the chapter on the new frontiers of evangelization, the document attempts not to fall into pessimism. It points to opportunities such as the increase in adult baptisms in some countries, the possibility of leveraging large events and networks, and the need for a language of closeness and credible communal experiences. It insists, however, that the main channels remain “person-to-person” encounters. The quality of community life, affection, hospitality, attention to the poor, form part of the proclamation. The kerygma (“Jesus Christ loves you, gave his life to save you and now lives at your side”) must occupy the center, not as an introduction that is later abandoned, but as the thread that runs through all formation.
However, the problem arises when the text seeks to illustrate family transmission “in dialect” with the testimony of Jesuit Aimé Duval. It invokes him in the chapter dedicated to the forms of transmission of the faith, specifically in the section on the family, to show how the Gospel was once communicated through everyday gestures more eloquent than any catechism. It cites the image of the exhausted father who, returning from the fields, knelt every night; of the mother who followed the prayers with a child in her arms; and Duval’s own conclusion: his father’s hands and his mother’s lips taught him more about God than the doctrine he had learned.
But the problem does not lie in the Jesuit’s family scene, which may be authentic and moving, but in the figure to whom it is attributed. Aimé Duval (1918-1984) was a priest of the Society of Jesus, French, who in the 1950s and 1960s achieved notable media success as a singer-songwriter and guitarist. He sold more than a million records, gave thousands of concerts in dozens of countries and became one of the faces of that generation of priests and religious who chose show business as a path of popular evangelization. That same trajectory led him to declared alcoholism, a suicide attempt in 1969 and a long and painful recovery through Alcoholics Anonymous. He himself narrated it without ambiguity in his autobiographical book L’enfant qui jouait avec la lune, published under the explicit subtitle “Chanteur, Jésuite, Alcoolique”.
Using as a paradigm of serene, generational transmission the childhood memory of a priest who, in his adult life, embodied the contradictions, wounds and excesses of an era of clerical and media experimentation, is disconcerting. The document does not mention these circumstances. It presents Duval solely through the sweetened filter of his childhood recollection, omitting that his public trajectory precisely illustrates the kind of disorders of worldly success, dependency and personal fragility that can hinder rather than favor a coherent transmission of the faith. Nor is it a matter of denying the possibility of conversion or recovery, but of warning that the Dicastery has chosen, to illustrate the transmission “of always,” a witness whose adult life contradicts the image of stability and coherence it seeks to convey.
The contrast is all the more striking because the document, in its final chapter, presents other contemporary testimonies of rediscovery of the faith (some anonymous, others linked to digital experiences or recovery processes). By privileging Duval’s idyllic scene without contextualizing it, the text risks offering a pastoral pedagogy that idealizes the past while evading the real consequences of certain life and style choices that marked part of the clergy and religious life in the second half of the twentieth century, weakening the credibility of the call to authentic witnesses precisely when intergenerational transmission is broken and when new technologies amplify both the opportunities and the risks of a disembodied faith.
If the transmission of the faith no longer occurs by family or cultural inertia, it requires an explicit, personal and communal proclamation of the kerygma, sustained by lives that do not contradict what they proclaim. As long as the Dicastery resorts to witnesses whose public biographies illustrate the wounds of a generation that sought media success and paid a high personal price, the diagnosis of the crisis loses force and the call to renewal remains incomplete. It is not enough to diagnose the rupture; it is necessary to clearly indicate which testimonies help and which hinder the credibility of the proclamation in a Catholicism of many dichotomies, but of great and authentic witnesses.
The question of the transmission of the faith, therefore, does not distance us from the depositum fidei, nor does it imply reducing the treatment to the merely subjective dimension of the fides qua. It is simply a call to the faithful to return to the heart of the patrimony of the Christian faith, the kerygma is, in fact, its central content, which runs like a golden thread through the harmonious hierarchy of the truths of Catholic doctrine.