THE Vatican’s General Secretariat of the Synod has distanced itself from last week’s working-group report on same-sex relations, which called on Roman Catholics to adopt a more positive approach to homosexuality (News, 15 May).

“These groups have worked autonomously — their reports are merely working documents,” the Secretariat said in a statement to the Spanish news agency Religión Confidencial. “Our work has been limited to translating the summaries, editing the reports and their publication and dissemination, in order to be consistent with the spirit of transparency and accountability characterising the synodal process.”

The brief statement followed widespread criticism of the 31-page report by one of ten working groups set up after the 2023-24 Synod on Synodality in Rome (News, 1 November 2024).

The document, co-ordinated by the Peruvian Cardinal Carlos Castillo Mattasoglio, said that many gay RCs felt profound “solitude and isolation”, and called on the Church to overcome a “theoretical model that derives praxis from a pre-packaged doctrine”.

Although welcomed by some LGBTQ+ campaigners, the report’s findings were dismissed as “simply false” by the Dutch Cardinal Wim Eijk. A Congolese member of the working group, Sister Josée Ngalula, told the US-based National Catholic Register she had not participated in drafting them.

The document was also criticised by Cardinal Gerhard Müller, a former Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Rt Revd Athanasius Schneider, a leading conservative spokesman and auxiliary bishop from Kazakhstan, dismissed it as a “direct attack on divine Revelation”.

In its statement, the Secretariat, which is led by the Maltese Cardinal Mario Grech, said that the report had not carried its logo and could not be attributed to it.