UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
Tom Reese, one of the pope’s fellow Jesuits and his usual strong supporter, says it flatly:
The list of those attending the Synod of Bishops on the family is a disappointment to those hoping for reform of the Curia and for those who hope that the laity will be heard at the synod.
A disappointment to those hoping that the laity will be heard at the synod. . . .
Let those words remain in your ears for a bit. We’ll return to them in a moment.
As Reese notes, for Catholics who may wonder whether “natural family planning” (that is, the rejection of contraception) is the church’s great gift to the laity, it appears the synod on the family is shaping up to be a repeat of the failed 1980 synod on the family: the pope has stacked the synod’s council of auditors (observers) with lay Catholics who promote “natural family planning” and oppose birth control.
Reese:
At the 1980 synod on the family, the lay participants were remarkable for how totally out of touch they were with the views of average Catholics. I fear this is a rerun.
This despite the fact that responses to the questionnaire sent out by the Vatican to lay Catholics in preparation for the synod uniformly and consistently report, insofar as bishops’ conferences have been willing to release their results, what we all have known for many years now: namely, that an overwhelming majority of Catholics in the developed sector of the world resoundingly reject the magisterial teaching about contraception. And that those lay Catholics had thought, when they replied to the Vatican questionnaire asking for honest feedback about church teaching re: family matters, that they were at last being given a voice in the church’s deliberations about these matters.
And then there’s the fact that Pope Francis’s list of pontifical appointees to the synod on the family includes Cardinals Angelo Sodano and Godfried Danneels. As Jerry Slevin notes in an essay just posted at his Christian Catholicism site, both men have deplorable records vis-a-vis the abuse crisis in the Catholic church — which is surely a family issue of the greatest critical importance to lay Catholics everywhere.
Regarding Sodano, Jerry quotes Jason Berry, who wrote last year in the New York Times:
But Cardinal Sodano ranks with the Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony as an egregious practitioner of the cover up. As John Paul II’s secretary of state, he pressured Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict, in two notorious cases.
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