UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
NCR Editorial Staff | Nov. 19, 2013
EDITORIAL
The documents we reprinted as a pullout in the center of the Nov. 22-Dec. 5 issue of the newspaper were sent to NCR by someone who feared the questionnaire from the Vatican about next year’s Synod of Bishops on the family wouldn’t get as wide a distribution as intended, at least here in the United States. The bishops of England and Wales put the questionnaire online for all to examine and respond to, but the instructions from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops didn’t seem to push for widest possible distribution.
NCR posted the documents online Oct. 31. At first, a couple church officials said NCR was making too much of this questionnaire — “We get requests like this all the time. We’ll handle it in the usual manner,” they said. The Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, told another news outlet Nov. 2 that it is “only a document sent to bishops’ conferences” and a part of the habitual “praxis” of the Synod of Bishops. To say the document was more than that, he said, was “not true.”
But on Nov. 5, the Vatican had called a news conference to explain the documents and it too posted them online. The Synod of Bishops’ general secretary, Archbishop Lorenzo Baldisseri, said he expected pastors would provide summaries of the views and experiences of their parishioners, and that their findings would be “channeled” in turn through national bishops’ conferences for ultimate consideration by the synod. However, he also welcomed individual Catholics to communicate directly with the synod’s offices at the Vatican. Synod staff would consider that input for the synod’s working document, which should be published in May 2014, he said.
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