A VATICAN working group has urged Roman Catholics to reconsider their approach to homosexuality in a new report welcomed by LGBTQ+ campaigners.
“Believers with same-sex attractions confirm how arduous it is for individuals and Christian communities to reconcile ‘doctrinal firmness’ with ‘pastoral welcome’,” the report, which was authorised by the Pope on the anniversary of his election, says.
“These polarised positions, often deemed irreconcilable, result in profound suffering, personal lacerations, and experiences of marginalisation or ‘double lives’. . . On the other hand, they trigger conflicts, oppositions, and seemingly incurable controversies within the life of the Church.”
The observation is contained in a 31-page document on “discernment in local churches”, by one of several working groups set up after the 2023-24 Synod on Synodality in Rome (News, 1 November 2024). The working group is believed to include the Peruvian Cardinal Carlos Castillo Mattasoglio and Archbishop Filippo Iannone, newly appointed Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops.
The report says that the Church should move beyond the “simple application of norms”, and overcome “the theoretical model that derives praxis from a pre-packaged doctrine”.
It publishes testimonies that speak of a “profound sense of solitude and isolation” felt by gay people “within both society and Church”, which had often been worsened by “contradictory advice” and the “devastating effects” of “reparative therapies aimed at recovering heterosexuality”.
“Sin, at its root, does not consist in the (same-sex) couple relationship, but in a lack of faith in a God who desires our fulfilment,” the report says. “It is a matter of starting from listening to experiences, and fostering pastoral and ecclesial practices of mutual knowledge, collaboration, inclusion, and dialogue among believers.”
Issues of gender and sexuality were referred for further study by the three-year General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, and have continued to divide liberal and conservative church leaders.
In its report, the Vatican working group says that current “pre-established and reductive frameworks” in RC teaching have tended to separate faith and sexuality.
Among policy proposals, it urges a “deeper understanding” of “biblical anthropology” relating to homosexuality, as well as a new look at same-sex marriage and how best to overcome “polarisation and division”.
Among LGBTQ+ campaigners welcoming the report, the founder of the US Catholic Outreach ministry, Fr James Martin, described its findings as “a big deal”. It was the first time that an official Vatican document had included detailed testimonies from gay Catholics, he said.
The director of DignityUSA, an LGBTQ+ church lobbying group, Marianne Duddy-Burke, said that the report appeared to recognise “that top-down attempts to dictate behaviour and morality based on dogma don’t work”.
The report has been criticised, however, by the conservative US LifeSite news agency, and by Cardinal Gerhard Müller, a former Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, who last week accused supporters of the RC Church’s synodal process of succumbing to “prevailing ideologies” under a pretext of “pastoral discernment”.
A fresh warning was issued last week to the Church in Germany by the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, after Cardinal Reinhard Marx, in his archdiocese, Munich & Freising, became the first cardinal to authorise same-sex blessing ceremonies (News, 1 May).