Window-dressing, or something new under the sun?

Vatican Radio is reporting this:

The preparatory document for next year’s Synod of Bishops on the Family was formally released at a news conference in the Vatican on Tuesday. The synod’s theme is “The pastoral challenges to the Family in the context of Evangelization and it will run from the 5th to the 19th of October 2014. The document gives an overview of Church teaching on the family and spells out in a frank manner the many daunting challenges facing the family in today’s society, saying there is an urgency for the Church to address these challenges. The document also includes a questionnaire or consultation containing 39 questions on family issues that has been sent to bishops conferences around the world asking them to share it as widely as possible so that input from local sources can be received.

5. On Unions of Persons of the Same Sex
a) Is there a law in your country recognizing civil unions for people of the same-sex and equating it in some way to marriage?
b) What is the attitude of the local and particular Churches towards both the State as the promoter of civil unions between persons of the same sex and the people involved in this type of union?
c) What pastoral attention can be given to people who have chosen to live in these types of union?
d) In the case of unions of persons of the same sex who have adopted children, what can be done pastorally in light of transmitting the faith?

Andrew Sullivan notes that UK bishops have put a survey online, seeking the input of parishioners but there is less interest for that in the US:

In the US, where the bishops are still dominated by reactionaries, no such direct input outside the bishops’ control looks likely. That effectively means, I fear, that the US hierarchy – think Cardinal Dolan – may not convey the real sensus fidelium on these matters: 

In the letter he sent to the bishops’ conferences in October, Archbishop Lorenzo Baldisseri, the secretary general of the Vatican’s Synod of Bishops, directed the prelates to distribute the questionnaire “immediately as widely as possible to deaneries and parishes so that input from local sources can be received.”One question is whether the archbishop and the Vatican meant for the world’s bishops to conduct a survey of their populations using the questionnaire. The U.S. bishops’ conference did not request the U.S. episcopate to undertake that wide of a consultation, telling the bishops in an Oct. 30 memo sent with Baldisseri’s letter only to provide their own observations. 

I think American lay Catholics should download the English questionnaire and send their views in directly, if the bishops still insist on controlling the data. And in any case, we already know what American Catholics think on many of these questions. Sophisticated polling outfits have provided the data for a long time. Either this initiative will echo those views or it will skew toward what the bishops want to hear. 

But my sense of this Pope – especially in his direct interaction with ordinary people – is that this is a chance for real democratic input, of not democracy itself (which would not be appropriate). Amy Davidson gives them a close read, and comes away thinking that this could be where the Francis revolution begins to move beyond rhetoric: 

What Francis seems to be looking for is not a doctrinal or political response to same-sex unions but a pastoral one: taking modern families as they are and live, and seeing how the Catholic Church can be part of their lives. (There is not a question about how best to lobby legislatures.) The synod, according to the document, is meant to address “concerns which were unheard of until a few years ago.” Its summary of these concerns is not in all respects liberal; it mentions “forms of feminism hostile to the Church,” and emphasizes the indissolubility of marriage. And certain situations that it calls novel, like that of single parents and of dowries “understood as the purchase price of the woman,” have been less unheard of than unheeded. 

But there are the seeds of something radical here. 

 As Waldo has noted in the past, the reaction of the US church- and, for that matter, of the Pope, in his recent interview- has been to argue, "We don't intend to change what we think about the gays, we just need to not talk about it much: 

Cardinal Timothy Dolan acknowledged on Sunday that there was still much to do to make the church welcoming to gay and lesbian Catholics. "We gotta do better to see that our defense of marriage is not reduced to an attack on gay people. And I admit, we haven't been too good at that.  We try our darndest to make sure we're not an anti-anybody," he said in an interview to be aired Sunday on ABC's "This Week." But the archbishop of New York said he wasn't sure how that outreach might work.    

But the archbishop of Detroit does:

The archbishop of Detroit told Catholics who support same sex marriage that they should effectively excommunicate themselves.

Archbishop Allen Vigneron on Sunday said that Catholics who support marriage equality and try to receive Communion would “logically bring shame for a double-dealing that is not unlike perjury,” according to the Detroit Free Press. 

Vigneron’s comments come after Sacred Heart Major Seminary canon law professor Edward Peters made similar remarks in a blog posting last month.

Waldo was struck by how the US Republican party took a similar tone after autopsying itself last winter. The party's leaders, ignoring a report that declared sticking to the party's present positions would, at best,r educe it to regional status, all came out and said, what we need is not to change what we believe, just how we talk about it.

Which is small comfort to moderate Republicans (and ex-Republicans), and Catholics and ex-Catholics, who are weary of hearing that they will always be second-raters in the institutions that mean much to them- but, those institutions promise to try and be nicer in the way they snub us.