UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Ken Briggs | Mar. 11, 2014 NCR Today
NCR’s admirable reporting startlingly concludes that roughly two-thirds of U.S. bishops haven’t broadly sought opinions from lay Catholics on family-related issues prior to the Synod on that subject later this year. The Vatican had promoted the idea by preparing a survey for that purpose, but, as NCR found, most didn’t follow through.
Why not if it had Rome’s endorsement?
Reasons vary, of course, but the question might as well be, why should they?
First, the bishops were asked to submit a report that could include survey results but didn’t have to. What would presumably be the advantage of distributing questions on birth control, divorced and remarried Catholics, marriage, etc., either on the Internet, as some did, or in parish settings? More information, certainly, but the information would be numbingly predictable. For decades, reliable polls have charted Catholic views toward the church’s cluster of teachings on sexual ethics. Rejection of those teachings, most starkly against the church’s prohibition of artificial birth control, has become an accepted fact. However well intended, the Vatican’s survey repeats the exercise and produces the same results. Catholics remain just as opposed to artificial contraception and to forbidding non-annulled, remarried Catholics to receive the sacraments as they have been all along as measured by Pew, Gallup and others.
The church survey therefore confirms the obvious. Any bishop who hasn’t been confined to a space capsule for the past 25 years understands this dissent whether or not he admits it. If he is among the few who want change, such findings might bolster his cause. But most don’t. Were I among them, why would I stir up a new round of protest?
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