New Poll: ‘Faithful Catholics’ an Endangered Species

New Poll: ‘Faithful Catholics’ an Endangered Species November 26, 2013
Pope Francis is full of surprises. This month he launched a survey of Catholic opinion in order to inform a special synod on the family scheduled to meet in Rome next October. Not surprisingly, it’s caught many national conferences of bishops on the hop. Under John Paul II and Benedict XIV they’d got used to a Vatican which looked inwards rather that outwards for authority. A favourite text was Lumen Gentium’s passage which insists that the magisterium of the Pontiff requires “religious submission of mind and will.” A survey of ordinary Catholics sits oddly with this stance. What can it mean?
Catholic opinion is divided on the answer. Conservatives say the survey’s designed to do no more than expose how the church’s irreformable teaching on family and sex needs to be strengthened. It will aid in the re-confessionalisation of the faithful, helping gather strayed sheep back to the fold. Reformists say the opposite. They welcome the initiative as a sign that Francis really cares about what ordinary Catholics think, and that Vatican II’s claim that the Church is “the whole people of God” is at last being made good.
A closer look at the questionnaire supports the conservative view over the reformist one, for it’s not a survey in any sense that a social scientist would recognize. The 38 questions are larded with theological jargon, and will leave many of the faithful scratching their heads and Googling the Catholic Encyclopedia. Take question 1a, for example:
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