Most of parish communications is a matter of discernment, with legitimate goods on both sides of the judgment. Some of it is not. A few categories of content should not be published by a parish, period, regardless of how warmly the submission was written or how well-intentioned the submitter.
This piece names three of them.
The list is not exhaustive. It is a starting list, the three clearest cases, offered as a way to begin the longer editorial conversation your parish probably needs to have. If your parish has published any of these in the past, this is not an accusation; it is an invitation to adjust going forward. Most parishes have, at some point, done each of them.
One: Identifying details of a minor in a sensitive context
A parish should never publish a minor’s name, age, school, or other identifying details connected to a sensitive situation. Illness. Family crisis. Bereavement. Anything safeguarding-adjacent. Anything that might matter to the child when she is older and searches her own name.
The family asking for prayers for their sick child want the prayers. That is good and right. But they may not have thought carefully about what publishing the child’s name and school in the parish newsletter means in a world where that newsletter is searchable online, archived, and accessible to anyone with an internet connection, now and in fifteen years.
The parish’s job is to protect the child, even when the family has not asked for protection, and even when the family are the ones submitting the request.
Prayers can be offered in general terms: a young person in our parish, a family in difficult circumstances, a child known to some of us. The specifics stay in the parish’s private prayer ministry, where they have always lived: in the book of intentions, in the bidding prayers at Mass where the name can be said aloud without being published, in the pastoral circle of people who already know.
This is not paranoia. It is the standard that safeguarding-aware parishes have been applying for years, and that the wider Church is moving towards as a matter of practice. If your parish has been naming sick children in the bulletin, this is the week to stop. The stop is simple; the conversation with the submitting family is short and, in almost every case, received with relief once it is explained.
Two: Speculative content about a living person’s faith, morals, or state of soul
A parish should not publish characterisations of living individuals that speculate about their relationship with God, their orthodoxy, their piety, or the state of their soul.
This applies to parishioners. It applies to public figures, whatever they have said. It applies to other clergy. It applies to people the parish disagrees with. It applies regardless of how obvious the speculation feels to the person drafting it.
The parish can disagree with positions. It can, in the right register and through the right voice, correct error on matters of faith when correction is needed. It cannot publish sentences like “we are concerned about the commitment of [named parishioner]” or “[named public figure] has clearly drifted from Catholic teaching” or “it is time we spoke plainly about [named person’s] example in the parish.”
The Eighth Commandment is explicit. A person’s reputation belongs to that person. The parish’s platform is not a mechanism for publishing judgments about individual souls, even when the judgments feel warranted and the person being judged is not present to defend themselves.
If the priest needs to address a public error, he does it on its merits, engaging the position rather than the person. If a pastoral matter requires attention within the parish, it is handled pastorally, in private, through proper channels, and not in print.
The parish will, from time to time, be asked to publish something that skirts this line. The skirting is often well-intentioned. The answer is the same regardless of the intention: no, or a careful rewrite that removes the named individual and speaks to the matter itself.
Three: Prayer request details that reveal what was said in confidence
A prayer request submitted to the parish is a confidence.
It may say please pray for my marriage or please pray for my brother in addiction or please pray for my adult daughter, who is in crisis. The prayer request belongs to the person who submitted it. It was given to the parish because the parish is trusted to hold it well. It was not given as content.
The parish should not publish these prayer requests in ways that reveal their specifics. The marriage. The addiction. The crisis. These are private griefs shared in a posture of vulnerability, and the vulnerability was directed to the prayer life of the parish, not to its newsletter.
The prayer request goes into the parish’s private prayer ministry. The priest prays with it. The dedicated intercessors in the parish pray with it. The Masses that intentions are offered for carry it. All of that is proper, and none of it requires publication.
The public communication, if there is any, stays at the level of: please remember in your prayers this week those facing difficulties in their families, those living with illness, and those who have asked for our prayers in particular circumstances. Specific enough to be genuine. General enough to preserve the confidence.
There are explicit, consented public prayer requests that sit outside this principle: the bereaved family who have specifically asked for their name to be mentioned, the sick person who has invited the parish’s prayers with their illness named. These are particular, consented cases, and they are welcome. The general principle is confidentiality unless explicit consent has been given to name the specifics. When in doubt, treat it as a confidence, and ask.
Closing
These three categories are not the whole list. A full editorial vetting checklist runs longer. But these three are the clearest, the most common, and the easiest to address once they have been named.
A parish that never publishes any of these three is a parish already practising most of the discernment this pillar describes. A parish that has been publishing any of them is not a bad parish. It is a parish that has not yet had the editorial conversations the work needs. The fix is straightforward. Adopt the editorial vetting checklist. Have the conversation with the safeguarding officer. Put the policy in writing. Tell the ministry leads what has changed, and why.
Move forward from here. The parishes that do this work well are not the parishes that have never made mistakes. They are the parishes that noticed the mistakes, named them honestly, changed the practice, and held the new line. That pattern is available to every parish, starting this week.
Begin with these three. The rest follows.
This piece is part of the Pillar 4 series within the True Light Digital Formation framework. For the full cornerstone essay on which it is based, see truelight.digital/formation/guardrails-and-discernment/.