Report reveals wide range of Catholic lifestyles

The reality of the lives of Catholics across the world is revealed this week in the working document for the forthcoming Extraordinary Synod on Marriage and the Family.

The document, or instrumentum laboris, was due to be made public at the Vatican on Thursday. It highlights the many forms of family that make up the Catholic faithful today. One section, called Difficult Pastoral Situations, highlights cohabitation, de facto unions, the divorced and remarried, teenage mothers, canonical irregularities and annulments.

Around 150 bishops will arrive in Rome on 5 October for the ­fortnight-long extraordinary synod on “pastoral challenges of the family in the context of evangelisation”. They will discuss the 75-page working document, which collates the findings of a survey conducted around the world in the later part of last year. Every bishops’ conference was tasked with consulting the faithful through a questionnaire devised in Rome, which invited responses  on a wide range of family-related topics that include divorce, homosexuality, birth control and cohabitation. The consultation closed on 30 November, and Conferences then forwarded their summaries of the findings to Rome, with a small number making them public first.

The working document is said to be  made up of three main sections: “Communicating the Gospel of the family in today’s world”, “Pastoral programmes for the family in the light of new challenges” and “Openness to life and parental responsibility”.

The first section reiterates church teaching from previous documents, including papal encyclicals, and there is a discussion of natural law, including comments on the lack of understanding of the theology of natural law on the part of Catholics.

Some sections reveal clear differences in culture. For example, there are descriptions of polygamy in Africa and couples living together before marriage to test female fertility. Meanwhile in the West the Church is facing questions about the union of same-sex couples and how to transmit the faith to children brought up by those couples. After seeing the document, one person said: “This is a very complex document ... It is an account of the reality of life.”

The working document is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Any recommendations will follow after the bishops have met at the synod. Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, secretary general of the Synod of Bishops, said last year that discussions on the family were urgently needed. At a conference entitled “Listening to the Family” held at the Gregorian University in Rome on 4 and 5 April this year, he indicated that he felt the laity were “under-­catechised”. This suggested that lay Catholics hoping the Vatican would heed their view that church teaching needed to be revised were likely to be disappointed.