Listening Without Hearing: A Critique of Synodal Study Group 9 on Homosexuality

Editor’s note: The following essay was penned by a participant in the Catholic apostolate of Courage.

Author’s note: I did not read the official response by Courage International before writing this essay, and thus arrived at the word “calumny” independently.

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On May 5, 2026, the General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops published the Final Report of Study Group 9, entitled “Theological Criteria and Synodal Methodologies for Shared Discernment of Emerging Doctrinal, Pastoral, and Ethical Issues,” together with two appended personal testimonies from men living in same-sex civil marriages.

The report is not magisterial teaching, but a document published under Vatican auspices, invoking the authority of synodal discernment and lived experience, is not without consequence. It deserves a careful answer.

What the Report Gets Right: Genuine Pastoral Concern for Human Dignity

Any fair critique of the Final Report of Study Group 9 should begin by acknowledging its genuine pastoral impulses. The document returns repeatedly, and sincerely, to the dignity of persons with same-sex attraction and the Church’s obligation not merely to tolerate but to genuinely accompany them. It explicitly invokes the condemnation of violence already present in Homosexualitatis Problema (1986), that “It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action.” This statement, which the Report mentions approvingly, is one that no thoughtful Catholic should dispute. The insistence that the Church must approach its pronouncements on faith and morals with an active, relational engagement with the human beings who are same-sex attracted reflects the best instincts of pastoral theology.

The Report’s section on possible pathways for synodal discernment likewise contains several proposals deserving genuine respect. It soundly calls for a serious engagement with the 2019 document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission titled What is Man? The acknowledgment that “suffering, solitude, and exclusion” accompany many persons with same-sex attraction, and that members of the Church have sometimes shown inadequate or wounding pastoral responses, reflects an attempt at honest reckoning. Catholics who have witnessed the damage done by contempt, dismissal, or public humiliation directed at persons with same-sex attraction will recognize the justice of this concern.

Pope Francis stated that “the Church is a mother [that] preaches in the same way that a mother speaks to her child,” (Evangelii Gaudium, Section 139). Mothers do not turn their children away. The Church is called to proclaim to every same-sex attracted person, without hesitation or qualification, what Saint Paul proclaimed to all: that nothing in all creation can separate them from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:39).

The Final Report thus contains genuine goods, and intellectual honesty requires mentioning this before turning to what is gravely mistaken.

A Calumny Against Courage: Misrepresentation as Method

Whatever its pastoral intentions, the Final Report recklessly bears false witness against an organization that has served many thousands of Catholics faithfully and well. In its analytical summary of the two testimonies, the Report states flatly that Courage is “a Catholic group… which, by pushing for ‘reparative therapy,’ had the effect of separating faith and sexuality.”

This characterization does not appear in the testimonies themselves. Annex A.2 mentions that the author joined Courage at the suggestion of a conversion therapist, a notably different claim, and Annex A.1 criticizes conversion therapy as a general phenomenon without attributing it to Courage at all. This false characterization of Courage as an organization engaged in “conversion therapy” is the Report’s own editorial invention, unsupported by its own source material. By contrast, in speaking with many participants in Courage, the author of this critique found that they have never been coerced or even encouraged to engage in conversion therapy. Many of the participants in Courage also expressed skepticism that such therapy would be effective.

Apparently, when listening, the Report’s authors heard only what they wished to hear.

Courage International, founded in 1980, is an apostolate grounded in the sacramental life of the Church, focused on Catholics with same-sex attraction. The original participants in Courage organized it around five goals: to live chastely in accordance with Catholic teaching; to dedicate one’s life to Christ through prayer, frequent reception of the sacraments, and spiritual reading; to foster fellowship so that no member faces the difficulties of homosexuality alone; to cultivate chaste friendships as essential to Christian life; and to live as a good example to others. Conspicuously absent from these goals is any program of “change in orientation.” Courage does not practice “reparative” or “conversion” therapy, contrary to what is falsely claimed by the Report. This is not a disputed point; it is a matter of organizational record.

Thousands of Catholics have found in Courage not secretive misery, as the testimony of a *single individual* in the Appendix suggests. Many of the participants in Courage instead found community, sacramental depth, the companionship of others, and the particular peace that comes from living in accord with one’s deepest convictions and faith. Yet their testimony is absent entirely from the pages of the Report. A Study Group that claims to have placed itself “in a position of listening” chose not to listen to their testimony.

This is not a minor oversight. The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls persons with homosexual inclinations to chastity, and calls the Church to accompany them “with respect, compassion, and sensitivity” (Sections 2358–2359). Courage is, quite literally, the Church’s primary organized attempt to fulfill this holy mandate. To misrepresent it in a synodal document as an apostolate that harms those it serves is not pastoral charity; it is polemical convenience dressed in the language of discernment.

The Corruption of Language: From “Controversial” to “Emerging” and Beyond

George Orwell observed in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” that ideological language is designed “to make lies sound truthful… and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Similarly, the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper, in Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power (Orig. 1974; Ignatius Press, 1992), argued that the corruption of language is never merely semantic but always finally moral: “if the word becomes corrupted, human existence itself will not remain unaffected and untainted.” A document of the Church should be held to a higher standard than either author demanded. Instead, the Final Report of Study Group 9 conforms to another of Orwell’s observations, that “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness”.

The Final Report of Study Group 9 announces that it has deliberately replaced the term “controversial issues” with “emerging issues.” The justification offered is telling: “controversial issues” implies the need for “problem-solving,” while “emerging issues” supposedly honors “the holistic nature of the commitment concerning the whole of the ecclesial community.” What this reformulation actually accomplishes is the removal of the word “controversial,” and its replacement with a term that frames received moral teaching as merely one moment in an “emerging” process whose terminus has not yet been identified. The implication is that controversy exists because the Church has not yet finished thinking, when the truth is that some Catholics wish to change what the Church teaches and has always taught. The renaming is not neutral; it is a conclusion dressed as methodology.

The document is saturated with similar constructions: “Paradigm shift,” “trans-disciplinary approach,” “historical, experiential, and practical hermeneutics,” “existential, social, and cultural ‘peripheries,’” “performative interpretation,” “healing and inclusion,” “safe space” and “lacerations and longings.” These phrases accumulate into a fog through which it becomes very difficult to ask simple questions. Does the Church’s teaching on the moral status of homosexual acts admit of revision? The Report will not say. Does the inclusion of same-sex couples in the life of the Church require a change in doctrine to allow for homosexual acts? The Report will not say that either. Instead, it says that we must avoid what it tendentiously frames as “pre-packaged doctrine.” The appearance of radical openness masks a radical evasion. A document that claims to honor the complexity of human experience should be willing to state what it is actually proposing, in language plain enough to be held accountable.

The importation of the acronym “LGBTQ” into the Report’s framing (appearing in the Report’s analysis of the testimonies) is another instance of this newspeak. This is not merely a shorthand; it is a category drawn wholesale from secular activist discourse, carrying within it a set of anthropological assumptions about the nature and fixity of sexual identity that are foreign to Catholic moral anthropology. The document’s unquestioning use of the term “LGBTQ” reduces human beings to an alphabet of identities. It even incorporates the term Q-“queer,” long considered offensive by many of the people it purports to describe.

Its use of T-“transgender” imports a contested theory of the relationship between bodily sex and personal identity that the Church has explicitly addressed and declined to endorse. Specifically, Pope Francis warned against any ideology that promotes “a personal identity and emotional intimacy radically separated from the biological difference between male and female,” insisting that “biological sex and the sociocultural role of sex (gender) can be distinguished but not separated” (Amoris Laetitia, section 56, quoting Relatio Finalis).

The Excluded Witness: Marginalizing the Faithful Through “Inclusion”

One of the Report’s recurring themes is the imperative of genuine listening: listening to those on the “existential, social and cultural ‘peripheries’”, while “tilting in favour of the disadvantaged, the marginalized, and the excluded.” The putative language of “inclusion” is everywhere, with particular attention to “those who are less visible or less able to express their voice”. It is therefore both striking and ironic that the document’s actual practice of listening is aggressively selective.

Both of the testimonies included as Annexes, the sole human voices on which the analysis of homosexuality is built, come from men currently living in same-sex civil marriages. The Report describes their testimony as evidence of “experiences of goodness” and a “journey of faith.”

Nowhere in the document is there a testimony from one of the many Catholics who have lived chastely with same-sex attraction and found therein fulfillment, spiritual depth, and peace. Nowhere is there a voice from the thousands of men and women who have participated in Courage and its affiliated apostolates and discovered that the Church’s teaching, far from being a death sentence, opened onto a freedom and an intimacy with Christ that they had not previously known. Nowhere is there a witness from someone who tried the path of acting on same-sex attraction, found it spiritually costly, and turned back. The “listening” the Report performs is attuned only to one particular register of human “lived experience.”

This is not a small methodological quibble. The Report explicitly proposes the sensus fidei fidelium, the sense of faith of the faithful, as a touchstone for discernment. But the sensus fidei, properly understood, is not a democratic aggregate of the opinions of those who “identify as” Catholic. The International Theological Commission in its 2014 document Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church clarified that this is “a supernatural appreciation of the faith” which “stems from that feeling for the faith which is aroused and nourished by the spirit of truth in order that, under the guidance of the teaching Church which they accept with reverence, the People of God may cling unswervingly to the faith given to the early Church.”

It is not a survey limited to those who dissent from that magisterium, and “not all the ideas which circulate among the People of God are compatible with the faith.” To invoke the sensus fidei while excluding the testimony of those who have found holiness and joy within the Church’s teaching is not to honor it but to distort it. The faithful who steadfastly affirm the virtue of chastity in sometimes heart-rending circumstances have been marginalized and rendered mute by a body that claimed to listen to everyone.

Conforming to the World: On Final Alignments and Their Costs

The Acts of the Apostles passage that Study Group 9 adopts as its governing image is the Jerusalem Council of chapters 10–15, in which the early Church decided not to impose dietary laws or circumcision on Gentile converts. This is a telling choice. The Council resolved whether ceremonial requirements of the Mosaic law, which had pointed typologically toward Christ and found their fulfillment in him, were binding on those coming to faith from outside Israel. Saint Paul’s answer, argued throughout Galatians and Romans, was that the ceremonial law had served its purpose; the new covenant in Christ had superseded it.

The parallel the Report implicitly draws is that received moral teaching on homosexuality might stand in the same relation to the future self-understanding of the Church as circumcision stood to the Gentile mission. This analogy collapses under examination.

The moral condemnation of homosexual acts in Scripture is not grounded in Mosaic ceremonial law but in natural law and in the theology of creation: in what it means for human beings, made male and female in the image of God, to strive to flourish in the fullness of that image. Saint Paul’s extended argument in Romans 1 and his catalogue in 1 Corinthians 6 are not applications of Torah ceremonial regulations. They are claims about the human person that Paul upholds precisely as the ceremonial law recedes. The analogy the Report leaves implicit is historically and theologically unsound, and its deployment as a rhetorical frame, even if not stated plainly enough to be debated, is an example of exactly the sleight of hand that Orwell warned against.

What the Report actually attempts, beneath its tendentious methodological language, is an alignment of the Church’s pastoral imagination with the regnant assumptions of Western secular culture regarding sexual identity and its expression. The second testimony reflects this alignment: “Reading the Bible in context made me realize that traditionalist interpretations have little to say about contemporary, life-giving same-sex relationships.” This is the core claim of the theology of sexual “liberation” developed primarily in the secular academy.

The Report incorporates this testimony without serious critical engagement: no response drawn from the Church’s tradition, no acknowledgment that the claim is contested, no engagement with scholars or contemporary same-sex attracted persons who have reached different conclusions. No reflection that, despite the privilege being assigned to the “contemporary,” there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9). No reference to the restatement by Pope Francis that “there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family” (Amoris Laetitia section 251, quoting Relatio Finalis), which the synodal document calls into doubt, but without the courage to state so plainly.

Pope Francis also warned against “ideological colonization” or the imposition of Western “progressive” assumptions on communities that have not sought them. He stated that “gender ideology, today, is one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations… because it blurs differences and the value of men and women” (La Nación interview, March 10, 2023). The wholesale importation of this gender framework, developed in the faculty lounges of secular universities, into a document of the universal Church is exactly the kind of cultural imperialism Francis named and condemned, imposed now on the Church’s own moral tradition.

When the Church mirrors back the assumptions and confusions of the surrounding culture, when it says, in effect, that the path to flourishing runs through “affirmation” rather than through the narrow gate, it offers its people a stone when they ask for bread. The cost of this alignment will fall most heavily not on those who advocate for it but on the people the Report purports to serve. The most vulnerable among them, those whose same-sex attraction has brought not “liberation” but confusion, compulsion, and desolation, will find in an “affirming” Church not accompaniment but abandonment dressed as welcome.

The distinctive gift that the Catholic Church can offer persons with same-sex attraction is precisely what no secular institution can offer: a vision of the human person capacious enough to hold sexuality within a larger account of the soul’s vocation, a sacramental community capable of accompanying suffering without endorsing every resolution of it, a theology of the cross that refuses to identify the good life with the comfortable life, and the promise, proclaimed without condition, that nothing in all creation can separate them from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

Related at CWR:
• “The dangerous error buried in the ‘Study Group #9’ Synod Report” (June 8, 2026) by Deborah Savage
• “Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power in the Church” (May 16, 2026) by Randall B. Smith
• “The Scandalous Synod Report: A Betrayal of Trust” (May 17, 2026) by Mary Rice Hasson and Theresa Farnan

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