The Catholic Church is accustomed to attacks against its teaching. The history of heresies over the centuries reveals the endless efforts of those who seek to replace Catholic doctrine with various errors. What the Church has only recently become accustomed to is that these attacks come from some of its own pastors, especially from the constant statements emanating from the office of the Synod of Bishops.
The latest imposition from the Synod is the recent full endorsement of the homosexual lifestyle contained in the Final Report of Study Group Number 9, titled “Theological Criteria and Synodal Methodologies for the Shared Discernment of Emerging Doctrinal, Pastoral, and Ethical Issues”.
This report attempts to discredit the Catholic teaching on the intrinsic immorality of homosexual acts—and on the disordered character of the homosexual inclination—by labeling it as an expression of an “obsolete” “paradigm” that can no longer be considered valid for communicating God’s will to his people.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “paradigm” as “a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations, as well as the experiments performed to test them, are formulated”. Describing Catholic teaching using the analogy of a framework upon which theories and experiments are organized implies degrading it from the realm of truth to that of a mere possibility among other ways of presenting divine revelation. Jesus Christ said: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (Jn 14:6). Is that a paradigm that needs to be improved?
The report includes two appendices in the form of testimonial interviews. In them appear two Catholic men—one Portuguese and one American—who proudly describe themselves as married to another man, even though the Catholic Church teaches that such a thing is impossible. Why would the Synod of Bishops publish interviews with men who reject the Catholic teaching on the nature of marriage, inspired by the Holy Spirit, as part of its attempt to discern the action of the Holy Spirit in the Church of today?
Report Number 9 gives us the answer: the Synod considers the so-called “homosexual marriage” as an open question:
Finally, in listening to the Word of God lived in the Church, it is necessary to address with parrhesia the currently recurring question of whether one can speak of “marriage” in relation to persons with same-sex attraction, equating their relationship to heterosexual conjugal union without recognizing the differences. Among these differences is, primarily, the evident impossibility of procreation per se linked to sexual difference, with respect to which assisted reproduction techniques pose additional difficulties.
Worse still, Report Number 9 considers all of Catholic teaching as susceptible to change:
The Church’s mission does not consist in proclaiming abstractly and applying deductively immutable and rigid established principles, but in fostering a living encounter with the person of the risen Lord Jesus Christ, engaging with the lived experience of faith of the People of God in its personal and social relevance, in relation to the various life situations and multiple cultural contexts. Only the fruitful tension between what is established in the Church’s doctrine and its pastoral practice and the life practices in which what is established is verified, in the exercise of personal and communal life in the light of the Gospel, expresses the generative dynamism of Tradition: in the face of the temptation of sterile and regressive ossification of principles and statements, of norms and rules, independently of the experience of individuals and communities.
Can the “lived experience of faith of the People of God” prevail over the doctrine of the faith? Welcome to the ecclesiastical embrace of “liquid modernity,” where metaphysical realism is abandoned and the dictatorship of relativism and subjectivism subjects everything to constant redefinition.
What is at stake, as is clearly understood, is the overcoming of the theoretical model that derives praxis from a “prefabricated” doctrine, “applying” general and abstract principles to the concrete and personal situations of life. The task, therefore, consists in rediscovering a fruitful circularity between theory and praxis, between thought and experience, recognizing that theological reflection itself proceeds from experiences of “good” inscribed in the sensus fidei fidelium.
The Synod has become the officially sponsored agent of the Holy See for the destruction of Catholic doctrine, presented and despised as a set of deductively formulated immutable and rigid principles: sterile, regressive, and ossified assertions; “prefabricated” doctrines that would be mere abstractions and theories.
Instead, we are told that we must listen to the “concrete and personal life situations,” because “theological reflection itself proceeds from experiences of ‘good’ inscribed in the sensus fidei fidelium”.
The testimony of the American homosexual Catholic—Jason Steidl, author of LGBTQ Catholic Ministry, Past and Present, whose photograph appeared on the cover of The New York Times alongside his “husband,” being blessed by Father James Martin, S.J., the day after the publication of Fiducia supplicans—offers a clear idea of where the Synod thinks theological reflection based on personal experience should be directed:
My sexuality is not a perversion, disorder, or cross; it is a gift from God. I have a happy and healthy marriage and flourish as an openly gay Catholic. It has taken years of prayer, therapy, and affirming community to get here, but I thank God for my sexuality and my state of life… Being an LGBTQ Catholic is not easy, and many days I suffer from the harm the Church has caused. But I also have hope. I have witnessed a conversion during Pope Francis’s pontificate at the local and universal level of the Church, and I hope to help build the body of Christ that reflects Jesus’s ministry of healing and inclusion.
The Synod’s office has decided to publish the statement of a homosexual lifestyle activist claiming that “I know many priests who have been attacked for supporting LGBTQ people… they receive arrows of hatred from homophobia.” Is this statement an example of the “sense of the faith of the faithful”? Or a repudiation of Christ’s faith in favor of immorality?
This destructive subversion sponsored by the Vatican must end now. Souls are being put in danger by the scandalous false teachings propagated by the Synod. Pope Leo must strengthen the brothers in the faith by putting an end to this poisonous betrayal of God’s truth.