Several couples attending the Roman Catholic Church’s synod on family issues were most surprised at how distorted the press coverage has been of the closed-door discussions. They must be new to the press to discover that reporters are constantly insisting the church bow to liberal ideology on sexuality and the family.
Carol Glatz of Catholic News Service talked to Pedro and Ketty de Rezende of Brazil:
The many difficulties facing families, discussed during the first week of the synod, "did surprise us. I think we weren't quite aware of all these challenges," she said.
Pedro told reporters what surprised him most was "what the press has been publishing."
"Many, many times it doesn't reflect what we see in there," he said.
The synod proceedings are closed to the press, but synod participants are allowed to be interviewed and to release their written speeches to the public.
Pedro said that instead of objective reporting on what was being said by synod participants, what he was seeing seemed to be suggestions about "what synod fathers should talk about."
However, he said, the synod discussions are being guided by the 23,000-word working document that came out in June.
"So I was pretty surprised to see what is coming out is not being quite faithful" to the themes in the document and participants' input, he said.
