By Robert Royal
It has often been said, though perhaps not enough in recent times, that the devil can cite Scripture for his own purposes. Whether the Evil One is at work in many of the current approaches to Scripture—in university departments and in some ecclesiastical circles—is a question best left to the proper authorities and even to exorcists. But there is no doubt that those who drafted the Final Report of Study Group No. 9: Theological Criteria and Synodal Methodologies for the Shared Discernment of Emerging Doctrinal, Pastoral, and Ethical Issues, released last week, engaged in a systematic abuse of Scripture.
It must be admitted that they are not alone. Much of current biblical scholarship appears to be the work of a lawyer searching for legal loopholes in favor of the usual “emerging” issues: LGBT collectives, the ordination of women, and suicidal concessions to postmodern “paradigms.”
A long line of doctors, martyrs, confessors, saints, spiritual teachers, holy men and women, ordinary Catholics, and popes—not to mention the Apostles and the early Church Fathers—would never even have admitted that such issues were “controversial,” which was the original area the study group was to consider. Much less that they were “emerging.”
Homosexuality, priestesses, and heterodox “paradigms” were quite common in the pagan world during the early centuries of Christianity. None of that “emerged” in the life of the Church at that time. All of it was flatly rejectable for the followers of “the Way.”
This makes the utterly reckless way the recent report handles Scripture and tradition obviously absurd, the product of a clumsily “contextualized” desire to produce a predetermined outcome, whether or not it aligns with Christian revelation or even with verifiable reality.
The report claims to believe that there are precedents in Scripture for changing prior beliefs, in the manner in which the Apostles decided that Gentile converts were exempt from some precepts of the Jewish law:
Starting from the account of the experiences lived by the Apostles—particularly Peter and Paul with Barnabas, in their ministry of proclamation to the Gentiles—re-read and illuminated in the light of the Word of God, the process of dialogue leads to a progressive and detailed community discernment of the issue. The decision taken synodally (“we have decided, the Holy Spirit and us” (Acts 15, 28) expresses the growing awareness of the Church of a more mature relationship with its Jewish roots: in this relationship it learns to discern, interpreting under the guidance of the Spirit, the experience it is experiencing, what has permanent meaning and finds its fulfillment in Jesus and what, on the contrary, has only a provisional value.
Ah, yes, more mature. As we are. This sounds plausible unless one examines more closely the claim and the way it is being manipulated—the mot juste—for a very different purpose.
Gentile converts were told: “Abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, from blood, from what is strangled, and from fornication.” (15, 29) Therefore, from potential idolatry and from πορνεια—which any Greek lexicon will tell you means not only prostitution, but fornication and impurity—.
Whatever one may say it means, the passage does not allow what both Jewish tradition and the practice of the early Church understood God had forbidden: the kind of same-sex relationships that the study group wishes to “emerge” now. One might think that, in 2000 years of Christian existence, they would already have “emerged” long ago. But they did not. And, in any honest evaluation, they cannot emerge now either.
Behind all this is hidden another sleight of hand, namely, the appeal to “lived experience” as a guide to current debates. In a certain sense, of course, lived experience is an important component of any individual life. But it is also the accumulated “lived experience” of our tradition; otherwise, we would all simply be inventing things—according to our convenience—on the go.
Early Christianity learned a great deal from Greco-Roman philosophies, in addition to its Jewish heritage. But, as I documented years ago in a long essay, even the great philosophers of classical Athens rejected homosexual acts.
Why is it then that now, after more than 2000 years of Christian “lived experience” (plus another 1400 years of the Mosaic Law), LGBT “testimonies” have become so important as to overthrow an uninterrupted moral tradition of millennia?
Perhaps it is simplistic to view this as a mere surrender to the decadent sexual inclinations of the present. But the simple, quite often, is the truth. As in this case.
Decadence always accompanies us in a fallen world. But the acceptance, even the celebration of decadence, is a rarity. Those decadent popes of the Renaissance whom people, Catholic and non-Catholic, enjoy deploring had at least one virtue: they did not attempt to affirm that their sexual sins were justified by their lived experience, and much less by a joyful and more mature understanding of what the Holy Spirit wants that we see and do now.
A Church that continues to encourage all, all, all to believe that what is impossible to accept is already halfway to being accepted is doing them a disservice. Both by confirming people in error and by confusing the rest of us.
It is worth noting that months passed after Pope Francis issued his 2023 declaration Fiducia supplicans on the blessing of homosexual couples and others in “irregular unions” until the German bishops announced their intention to do it formally. We learned just last week that, as a result, in 2024 a letter was sent to the Germans “warning that such blessings could be interpreted as the legitimization of unions incompatible with Church doctrine.”
Thus, we have this chain of events: a document that allows homosexual blessings, then a letter from the prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Fernández (who previously issued the document), to the German bishops saying that they cannot be formalized without contradicting Church doctrine, and now a report from a synodal study group claiming that a “paradigm shift” is needed due to [LGBT] “lived experience.”
Even non-Catholics used to say before that “at least the Catholics know what they believe.” Do we still know?
Only Pope Leo is in a position to resolve this diabolical confusion, which he cannot ignore.
About the author
Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century, Columbus and the Crisis of the West and A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.