Bishop: Synod questionnaire shows most reject teaching on contraceptives | National Catholic Reporter

"The train left the station long ago" is the report of St. Petersburg, Florida Bishop Robert Lynch.  Catholics pay little heed to Church teaching on birth control - and don't have much to say for its approach to divorced Catholics, people living together, and same-sex couples.  This will come as no surprise to conservative Catholic legal theorists like Doug Sisk at St. Thomas (Minneapolis) who appear to have thrown in the towel on stopping the secular juggernaut which conflates religion with conscience.  Abandoning the conservative critique of rights as irresponsibility he has now positioned himself in the debate over the contraception mandate as a defender of diversity: the right of the minority to adhere to its countercultural norms.  Fine with me - so long as they don't establish their reactionary religious norms and impose them on others: which is what the contraceptive mandate objectors seek to do, as Nelson Tebbe, et al. argue.
 - GWC
Bishop: Synod questionnaire shows most reject teaching on contraceptives | National Catholic Reporter:

In an unusually blunt report to the Vatican, Bishop Robert Lynch of St. Petersburg, Fla., said that even most regular churchgoing Catholics in his diocese find the church's teaching on artificial contraception no longer relevant.
"On the matter of artificial contraception, the responses might be characterized by saying, 'That train left the station long ago,' " he wrote in a Feb. 7 blog about his report. "Catholics have made up their minds and the sensus fidelium [the sense of the faithful] suggests the rejection of church teaching on this subject."
In the blog on his diocesan website, Lynch said more than 6,800 Catholics in the diocese responded to a Vatican request worldwide for local church feedback on pastoral issues of marriage and family life, in preparation for October's special synod on that topic. He said he sent his report on the results to the Vatican in mid-January.
Most of the respondents agreed with church teaching that marriage -- or at least sacramental marriage -- is strictly a union of one man and one woman, he said, but at the same time many had serious problems with the church's pastoral approach to divorced and remarried couples and to same-sex couples.
He said they also had issues concerning the way the church deals pastorally with young couples cohabiting before marriage, a phenomenon that has grown significantly in recent years.

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