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Must the Church be transparent?

Sunday, October 31, 2021 (03:17)

A journalist asked the core team: Will you publish every introduced consultation report on your website? Or will you keep these reports for yourself and not share them with others?

My spontaneous answer had been to add the following sentence on the sinod website: “If the reporter gives us permission to do so, we will publish the report on our website (unless there are legal or technical issues).”

I needed the Bishop’s patient explanations to realize that this would be unrealistic. Considering how much discussions in the core team we had already about almost every single sentence on the current sinod website, it is easy to imagine the avalanches of never-ending discussions we would have if we receive hundreds of reports from other people, each of which we would have to check for validity and legal issues (like defamation or privacy issues).

Our answer had to be: “The core team has only limited human resources, therefore we cannot promise that we will publish your reports on this website. Every reporter is of course free to publish their report somewhere else as well.”

And probably e won’t even add this sentence on our website because such a sentence would disturb normal people. Of course certain people ask such questions, but we can answer the question when they ask, we don’t need to explain every detail on the website.

Must the Church become more transparent?

Transparency is an important thing nowadays, if you want others to trust you. The Church has grown almost 2000 years in a world where people did not require transparency. They just trusted the Church.

But it’s true that nobody is fully transparent. And transparency is not cheap, it causes considerable administrative effort. There is always a balance between what is useful and what is realistic. If you try to explain to everybody why you act as you act, you will never get your job done.