Voices of Catholics who attend are needed

With reference to Paul Culhanes’s Sept. 27 guest view, “Laity’s role in picking area’s next bishop,” it has been said that massive amounts of time are wasted by Voice of the Faithful and other church reform groups on issues like “bishop selection.” I believe that the organizers of the initiative do not suffer from the mistaken notion that their input would really influence the selection process. The overall goal of the VOTF bishop selection initiative is likely to educate Catholics about their rights and responsibilities. So, a potentially valuable spinoff of the effort would be an awakening of pew-sitting Catholics to the fact that they are the church — the people of god.

How revitalized American Catholicism might be structured in the distant future will depend on the extent to which pew-sitting Catholics — the truly silent majority who habitually obey and pay — respond to this and other “awakenings” to Vatican II reforms by going on to live (or not) the gospels in accordance with informed consciences.

Frank G. Splitt

Mount Prospect