Church Fifth Column Rewrites Vatican Family "Survey" for own Agenda

This article, to which we contributed, appeared in today's California Catholic Daily.

Vatican survey used as propaganda tool
LGBT efforts to skew results

The November 28, 2013 issue of San Francisco’s homosexualist Bay Area Reporter published an article titled “Vatican asks Catholics for views on marriage.”

The BAR article began “In yet another indication of a changing Catholic Church, the Vatican is asking members of the laity their views on marriage and family life – and a whole lot more.

“News of Pope Francis’s wish to hear from the faithful on a variety of topics – including same-sex marriage, contraception, cohabitation, divorce, and remarriage – broke in a recent story in the National Catholic Reporter.

From coast to coast, reaction from LGBTs is “uniformly positive…”

The Vatican document Pastoral Challenges to the Family in the Context  of Evangelization begins: “The mission of preaching the Gospel to all creation, entrusted directly by the Lord to his disciples, has continued in the Church throughout history. The social and spiritual crisis, so evident in today’s world, is becoming a pastoral challenge in the Church’s evangelizing mission concerning the family, the vital building-block of society and the ecclesial community. Never before has proclaiming the Gospel on the Family in this context been more urgent and necessary. The importance of the subject is reflected in the fact that the Holy Father has decided to call for a Synod of Bishops, which is to have a two-staged itinerary: firstly, an extraordinary general assembly in 2014, intended to define the status quaestionis and to collect the bishops’ experiences and proposals in proclaiming and living the Gospel of the Family in a credible manner; and secondly, an ordinary general assembly in 2015 to seek working guidelines in the pastoral care of the person and the family.”

At the bottom of the document is a series of questions that “allows the particular churches to participate actively in the preparation of the extraordinary synod.” Certain Catholics have apparently taken “active participation” to mean rewriting the survey for use in furthering their political agenda within the Church. Anti-family groups have issued their version of the survey and will forward the results to Rome. The group includes Call to Action, New Ways Ministry, DignityUSA, Roman Catholic Womenpriests, and others. These groups’ survey can be accessed through the National Catholic Reporter. The introduction reads:  “As organizations committed to ensuring that all Catholics have a voice in Church governance and policy, we want to make sure that you have a chance to have your voice heard on these important matters. In order to do that, we have developed an online survey that reflects the original intent of the survey sent by Archbishop Lorenzo Baldisseri for you to complete. Questions marked with * have been added for additional information, and were not part of the original bishops’ survey.”

That the anti-family survey “reflects the original intent” is not true. This survey was far more interested in controlling the response than was the Vatican document. The Vatican document had no “multiple choice” answers–Catholics could respond in any way they liked.  By contrast, 23 of the 49 questions in the Call to Action survey have multiple-choice answers, followed by a ‘comment” field. Multiple-choice surveys, which restrict the range of possible responses, are a well-understood instrument for producing prefab results.

In the Vatican document, question 8a reads: “Jesus Christ reveals the mystery and vocation of the human person. How can the family be a privileged place for this to happen?”  No such question appears in the anti-family survey. In fact, neither the words “Jesus” nor “Christ” appear in this survey.

Here’s an example where the LGBT survey did not use an asterisk—indicating they did not consider it an “added” question. Question 5b in the Vatican document reads: “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?” Survey takers were invited to respond in any way they liked. But in the CTA survey the same question (#30) was presented as: “What is the attitude of the following towards marriage equality?”  “The following” were then disaggregated answer categories. The first three (of six) answer categories were: “Attitude of my diocese toward marriage equality,” then “Attitude of my parish toward marriage equality,” then “Attitude of my small faith community toward marriage equality.” The multiple-choice responses were: “Hostile and Condemning”; “Negative”; “Neutral/NA”; “Somewhat supportive”; or “Highly supportive”.

In the first three answer categories, although the question itself was deliberately spun, there was a logical relation to the question. The answer categories simply investigated the question at diocesan, parish, and small faith group levels. But in the second set of three answer categories new factors are introduced that have nothing to do with marriage, or even same-sex “marriage,” at all. The next three answer categories to the same question “What is the attitude of the following towards marriage equality?” were: “Attitude of my diocese toward same-sex couples” then “Attitude of my parish toward same sex couples in a committed partnership” then “Attitude of my small faith community toward same sex couples in a committed partnership.”  Those three categories of persons are not found in the Vatican’s question, which concerned people in same-sex civil unions. They aren’t even found in Call to Action’s own question “What is the attitude of the following towards marriage equality?” In a serious survey those questions would be seen as senseless, but this pro-homosexual survey is designed as a propaganda tool.