Dear Friends,
Let me continue from last week with summarizing the results of our local input to the Synod that Pope Francis called. The Synod was called to reflect on the Church itself.
There were several areas where participants felt the Church needed to offer healing and pastoral outreach:
- Survivors of sexual abuse by Church personnel spoke of the deep wounds they continue to carry and the need for further healing. The following statement from the Preparatory Document echoes the experience of the archdiocese: “For too long the cry of the victims [of sexual abuse by clerics and consecrated persons] has been a cry that the Church has not been able to hear sufficiently. These are deep wounds that are difficult to heal, for which forgiveness can never be asked for enough.”
- The LGBTQ+ community and divorced and civilly remarried Catholics stated that they feel alienated from the Church.
- Respondents desire more opportunities for faith formation, retreats, and other events to teach them more about their faith. They said this knowledge would help them perform missionary outreach.
- There is a concern that priests are overworked. Respondents would like to reduce this burden but are unsure how.
If you wish to see the complete percentage of responses from the different age group in regard to the many questions asked, then you need to go to the Archdiocesan website and click on the Synod summary. There are simply too many different details to adequately summarize here. One important area for the future of the local church was the people’s response to the question concerning how likely they were to recommend their parish to a co-worker or a friend.
People who said they would be likely to recommend their parish to others cited a great priest, a vibrant parish community, a beautiful church, or belonging to a group they like. In the Spanish-speaking community, one of the main reasons for recommending their parish was a Spanish-speaking priest.
Even those who said they were likely or very likely to recommend their parish to a friend or colleague said they would only do so if they were asked, which rarely happens. As a result, the statistics do not accurately reflect how many people recommend their parish to others.
Those who said that they would be unlikely to recommend their parish said it was because of a dislike of their priest or because the community was not welcoming. In the Spanish-speaking communities, it was often because they did not like some of the people that led groups in the parish or that the parish was not welcoming or lacked community.
Other reasons people stated for being unlikely or very unlikely to recommend their parish include: Mass is not engaging, including boring homilies. Many cited a lack of interesting activities for their age or state of life. And many shared a perspective that too great of a focus was placed on money. It should be noted that only 4.95% of respondents said they are unlikely to recommend their parish, and only 1.87% were very unlikely. Many young adults in the Omaha area report feeling lost in a big parish. In the rural parishes, a common theme was that parishes were not open to outsiders.
More to come next week…
Peace,
Fr. Damian