UNITED STATES
Questions from a Ewe
Remember that brief 39 essay question survey the Vatican issued a few months back? You know… the one soliciting opinions about the church’s teachings on human sexuality and marriage to act as input to this October’s Synod on the Family. Well, the Vatican has compiled and released its preliminary findings from the survey in a document called an instrumentum laboris. Literally translated from Latin as…and we know the Vatican is all about literal Latin translations… granting us, O Lord, we pray, to hear about impoverished Jesus having an oblation in a gallant chalice held by his holy and venerable hands on a regular basis… But, I digress. Literally translated, instrumentum laboris means “instrument of labor”, basically a tool.
If you don’t want me to spoil your pleasure reading the 85 page report yourself, then stop reading now. However, if you don’t want to invest numerous irretrievable hours of your life reading a report that could have been written without surveying a single person, you might prefer reading this summary instead.
When it was first issued, I wrote this about the survey in a November 2, 2013 blog article, “…do not place too much hope that the Vatican seeking your opinion means the Vatican will actually heed your advice. It might again just inspire the Vatican to write another really long document in Latin explaining why you are wrong.”
It turns out that statement was prescient other than the Vatican crowd did disappoint by writing the original report in Italian rather than Latin. Don’t despair. We can still hope that some dreadfully long academic admonition in Latin emerges from the Synod itself.
To be fair, amidst the 85 pages of “We are right so how do we get these stubborn, misguided idiots to follow us…”, there were 2 entire sentences acknowledging the hierarchy’s lack of credibility as a moral authority since its culture enables criminal sexual abuse of children (paragraph 75). And there was a half sentence which came dangerously close to acknowledging cultural sexism, “In some places characterized by a somewhat sexist cultural tradition, there exists a certain lack of respect towards women…” (paragraph 55)
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