Pope Francis used Twitter to set the tone for the two-week extraordinary session of the synod of bishops on the family that starts on Sunday "Happy families are essential for the Church and for society," Francis said via the papal Twitter account, @Pontifex.
The synod, which will focus on "the pastoral challenges of the family in the context of evangelisation", is part of the process of providing the pope with proposals for new guidelines for the Catholic Church on family-related issues.
It will precede a larger gathering, the Ordinary Synod on the family, set to take place in a years time in the Vatican in October 2015.
Among the issues on the agenda are divorce, couples living together outside of marriage, contraception and homosexuality.
The pope, who greeted thousands of paralympians during a meeting Saturday, seemed to want the Church to shed its image for having a hardline on these subjects.
He famously said once that he was in no position to judge gay people who seek God and he recently presided over a marriage ceremony in St Peter's for a number of couples, including some who already had children and had been living together.
"There's a door that up to now has been closed and he wants it to open," the Synod's Secretary General Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri told ANSA when asked about the Argentine pontiff's aims for the meeting. "If this synod is devoted to the family it's because the family is different to 33 years ago and the times of (John Paul II's apostolic exhortation) Familiaris Consortio.
"If we deny this, we'll stay 2,000 years back. We have to put the doctrine into the current reality of the family".
A total of 191 senior clergy from all over the world will attend the two-week gathering - the first synod since Francis was elected the head of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics last year. There will also be 16 experts, 38 auditors, who are largely married couples, and 8 fraternal delegates. The couples include one of mixed religion where the husband is Muslim and the wife is Catholic.
Some commentators have said the synod may turn into something of a showdown between liberal and conservative elements within the Church, with the issue of whether Catholics who divorce and remarry should be able to take communion a possible battleground. Cardinal Walter Kasper, a theologian considered close to the pope, caused controversy by mooting the possibility that people in second marriages should be able to do so.
That prompted five conservative cardinals to defend the current rules on this issue in a book entitled Remaining in the Truth of Christ.
The synod will use a working document, the Instrumentum Laboris, which was compiled on the basis of feedback gathered from a survey of priests and laity. The document said that many Catholics show "difficulties" in accepting the Church's doctrine on "birth control, divorce...
homosexuality, unmarried couples, faithfulness, sex before marriage and in vitro fertilization".
It also talked of the importance of mercy in responding to what it describes as "the new challenges of the family" and the difficulty faced by many of accepting sometimes controversial teachings.
The Instrumentum Laboris devoted eight pages to separation, divorce and remarriage, acknowledging in particular the pain and suffering of divorced and remarried Catholics desiring to receive Communion.
"Some Church members who are cognizant that they are in an irregular situation clearly suffer from the fact that they are unable to receive the sacraments," the document stated.
"Many feel frustrated and marginalized. Some wonder why other sins can be forgiven and not theirs".
In the face of such situations "the Church needs to equip herself with pastoral means which provide the possibility of her more widely exercising mercy, clemency and indulgence towards new unions," the document said.
The Instrumentum Laboris also said that, while the Catholic Church should not recognise any form of gay union, it should baptize children living with homosexual parents if those parents request it.
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