VATICAN CITY (CNS) – To help set the agenda for the 2015 Synod of Bishops on the family, the Vatican is sending the world’s Catholic bishops’ conferences a list of questions on a range of topics, including matters of marriage and sexuality that proved especially controversial at the 2014 family synod.

Together with the final report of the 2014 assembly, the 46 questions published by the Vatican Dec. 9 comprise a preparatory document, known as a “lineamenta,” for the Oct. 4-25 synod, which will have the theme: “The vocation and mission of the family in the church and the modern world.”

Bishops’ conferences are being asked to consult with “academic institutions, organizations, lay movements and other ecclesial associations” in preparing their responses, which are due at the Vatican by April 15. The bishops’ responses will serve as the basis for the synod’s working document, to be published by summer.

A list of 38 questions, sent to the world’s bishops in October, 2013, was widely circulated on the Internet and helped generate advance interest in the 2014 synod.

The questionnaire for 2015 instructs bishops’ conferences to “avoid, in their responses, a formulation of pastoral care based simply on an application of doctrine,” in favor of what it describes as Pope Francis’ call to “pastoral activity that is characterized by a ‘culture of encounter’ and capable of recognizing the Lord’s gratuitous work, even outside customary models.”

Yet the questions echo the relatively conservative tone of the 2014 synod’s final report, which emphasized traditional Catholic teaching by comparison with the same assembly’s midterm report. The earlier document had stirred controversy with remarkably conciliatory language toward people with ways of life contrary to church doctrine, including the divorced and civilly remarried and those in same-sex unions and other nonmarital relationships.