QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — The world is wounded, Catholic leaders said Thursday in Ecuador. But an emphasis on supporting the family could be a path towards healing.

Catholic leaders from more than 50 countries have discussed this and other topics in Quito, the Ecuadoran capital, during this year's International Eucharistic Congress, which will run through Sept. 15.

Thursday's agenda was focused on family and fraternity. Both topics where addressed by Pope Francis in a recorded message that was played during the opening ceremony last Sunday. “It's an essential condition for a new, fairer world,” said Francis, who just opened the final leg of his tour through four countries.

“Today it is not possible to save ourselves on our own happy island and isolate,” said Cardinal Mauro Gambetti, vicar general for the Vatican. “We need to walk together.”

Rosalía Arteaga, former Ecuadoran vice president who attended the congress, said to The Associated Press that family is a “corner stone” for fraternity, “not from a patriarchal perspective,” but because good relations between parents and children help in preserving society's values.

In Ecuador — where 80% of its 17 million people identify as Catholic — same-sex marriage was legalized in 2019. Abortion was decriminalized in cases of rape in 2022, though activists consider it insufficient and discriminatory, and keep pushing to widen sexual and reproductive rights.

During his remarks Thursday, Monsignor Graziano Borgonovo, appointed by the pope as under-secretary of the Dicastery for Evangelization, said that families, as social institutions, are currently in “crisis” due to same-sex marriages and “other forms of coexistence."

“The family is the original nucleus,” Borgonovo said.

A Jesuit priest, Iván Lucero, said that the Catholic Church could look for new ways to support same-sex marriages and non-traditional families.

“The pope has a greater understanding and closeness to these couples, whose number is growing,” Lucero said. “But at the same time, we must ensure that the traditional family is not lost or questioned.”

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