We’re Here, We’re Queer, We’re Catholic
The Synod has formally decided to identify some Catholics — and not others — by sexual orientation and gender identity. To what end is the Church being led? Must the faithful simply “get used to it”?
This essay was previously published at Catholic World Report July 27 under the title “The Serious Problems with the ‘Radical Inclusion’ Delusion.” I am posting it, with some changes, here at my Substack in anticipation of the October Synod, which opens this week in Rome.
The Synod 2021-24 is constructing Jesuit Father James Martin’s bridge.
The authors of the Instrumentum Laboris (IL) for October’s Vatican gathering have embedded an acronym that derives from and embraces the sexual revolution: LGBTQ+. While it claims to serve as a “prophetic witness to a fragmented and polarized world,” the Synod is, in fact, collaborating with the prevailing culture’s divisive, identity-based ethos.
Because “LGBTQ+ Catholics” are, we are told, among those who do not “feel” accepted or included in the Church, the Synod “will create spaces” where “LGBTQ+ people” and others “who feel hurt by the Church” no longer “feel” invisible and unwelcome.
LGBTQ+ refers to the “limitless sexual orientations and gender identities used by members of our community,” as the political advocacy group, Human Rights Campaign, explains. Incompatible with reason and faith, the acronym signifies the culture’s belief that persons — like gods — have complete dominion over their own bodies and sexual faculties.
Even accustomed as we are to the separation of Americans into identity groups, that a Synod of the Catholic Church refers to baptized human beings in this manner should be a big deal.
A designation without any limiting principle seeds the synodal path with the instability and self-indulgence of a culture in the invasive grip of queer and gender theories. No assembly selects LGBTQ+ to modify Catholics unless ulterior motives are afoot — and they are.
The Radical Inclusion of LGBTQ+ in Church Discourse Is a First Step
“Respect,” says Fr. Martin in Building a Bridge, “means calling a group what it asks to be called.” The collective voice heard by Fr. Martin originates in secular identity politics, and “what it asks to be called” is, as Carl Trueman explains, fundamentally incoherent.
To differentiate Catholics by sexual desires and gender identities intentionally positions these features as integral to our nature as persons created in the image and likeness of God. This queering of the imago Dei aims, over time, to “enlarge” the boundaries of Church discourse, “making room” in the Catholic tent for the types of nuance that have destabilized norms since Eden.
The IL itself points in this direction when it calls for a “renewal of language” used by the Church so that the “richness” of its tradition becomes more “accessible and attractive to the men and women of our time, rather than an obstacle that keeps them at a distance.”
As is all too common today, assertions — in this case, about Catholic tradition and teaching — are treated as facts. In the Synod, as in the culture, feelings, rather than virtues, are authoritative. When a radically inclusive prelate declares that “the Catholic community contains structures and cultures of exclusion that alienate all too many from the church or make their journey in the Catholic faith tremendously burdensome,” he cedes sovereignty to sentiments. [italics throughout mine]
The jargon of “structures and cultures of exclusion” obfuscates reality: in a culture rapidly dismantling standards and norms, what alienates “all too many” is a Church that counters the culture. That the sacred deposit of faith does not accommodate “all too many” behaviors celebrated by secular society is now a personal affront.
I am a child of God who has been baptized Catholic: the universal identity of all Catholics. That I am a man sexually attracted to other men neither detracts from nor adds to the truth to which the Church must always bear witness.
To allege that Church discourse is an “obstacle” keeping me, or any other Catholic, “at a distance” or that its doctrines make our faith journey “tremendously burdensome” mimics a culture that nurtures weakness to maintain a steady supply of useful victims. To insist, as our famous American Jesuit does, that a Catholic leader’s assumption when encountering any LGBTQ+ person “must be that you are meeting someone who has suffered and may still be suffering” debases individual human dignity, turning each person into an object of pity.
Christians are called to live, albeit imperfectly, truly radical lives: to deny the self, pick up the cross, and follow Jesus Christ. It is by His grace — and His mercy — that we are lifted up each time we fall. As Catholics, we need strong priests who confidently and lovingly illuminate the Word and thus fortify our resolve, which the world all too artfully undermines.
The Next Step Is Normalizing Disorder
LGBTQ+ epitomizes objective disorder, its Q+ a constant of confusion and illogic into which a Church thus incorporating it falls.
At present, synodal documents referring to our “brothers and sisters” in Christ exclude our “other siblings in Christ,” a logically-necessary addition to the community of the baptized. The phrase acknowledges our Q+ Catholics — the non-binary, the genderqueer, and the gender-fluid among them— and has been utilized by radically inclusive theologian Fr. Dan Horan, OFM.
The Synod’s evident eagerness to promote the baptismal dignity of women collides with its call for greater inclusivity of LGBTQ+ Catholics, some of whom reject their “sex assigned at birth,” a mendacious phrasing integrated by definition into the acronym. Since any consideration of “women’s inclusion in the diaconate” will have to encompass biological males who identify as women (trans women), so too the priesthood must be opened to biological females who identify as men (trans men).
To do otherwise denies the baptismal dignity of LGBTQ+ Catholics.
A radically inclusive Church can never clearly say what a man or a woman is lest Genesis offend, and will most certainly feel compelled to revamp discourse that “marginalizes” homosexual activity.
Such a Church, like the culture it emulates, requires sensitivity readers. The language of sections 2357-59 of the Catechism is, I am told, harmful and a disservice to those of us who are gay. We are perceived as men without chests, too overwhelmed by our desires to grasp rationally the truth that same-sex inclination is “objectively disordered” and homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and “contrary to the natural law.”
Any changes in Church discourse made here will lead to revisions elsewhere. The subsequent section 2360, for example, concerns the “Love of Husband and Wife,” which declares — exclusively, problematically, and without apology — that “sexuality is ordered to the conjugal love of man and woman.”
As the gnostic queer theology espoused and currently taught at a number of Catholic institutions takes root, our conception of “ordered” will broaden. To be sure, discerning theologians shall eventually locate both sodomy and mutual masturbation within the totality of God’s design.
An American cardinal attending the October Synod already argues that the Catholic tradition that “all sexual acts outside of marriage constitute objectively grave sin” focuses the Christian moral life “disproportionately” on sexual activity.
Yes, Catholic doctrine is an inconvenience 60 years into a sexual revolution. And chastity — a life-long training in self-mastery — does appear anachronistic in a culture that revels in unconstrained self-gratification. However, reality — the plague of social pathologies arising from that revolution’s success — objectively documents why, for humanity’s sake, the focus of Catholic tradition remains clear-eyed and crucial.
The past decade of queer transformations within mainstream Protestant churches offers Catholics a preview. The worldwide Anglican communion has passed the breaking point. From transgender clergy to non-binary bishops, in a radically inclusive church, the center cannot hold.
Is a Synodal Path That Bypasses the Family a Good Path to Take?
We are six decades into a sexual revolution that has devastated the institutions of marriage and family. What says the Synod?
The synodal path not only steers clear of the readily apparent social and cultural wreckage but avoids truth — including the prophetic Humanae Vitae — in its embrace of objective disorder.
The triumph of the LGBTQ+ agenda has created a pied piper culture, enticingly packaged in rainbow colors, that informs children that husbands marry husbands, wives marry wives; that affirms the fantasies of kids claiming they were “assigned” the wrong sex; that demands girls share their formerly private spaces with boys; that compels lessons in sexual orientation and gender identity as early as kindergarten, and adds “queerness” wherever children can be reached. What says the Synod?
Why does a Synod specifically promoting co-responsibility within the Church ignore the vital social role of the mother and father, who together have society’s only essential co-responsible task: bringing forth new life, protecting and educating their offspring, and raising them as Christians?
High percentages of lay men and women, we are told, have been involved in the Synod. However, a reading of synodal documents indicates its lay participants have included very few parents with recent first-hand experience changing diapers; bandaging cuts and scrapes; reading stories to sleepy heads; readying youngsters for school; and monitoring the culture’s efforts to bypass Mom and Dad through television, internet, classrooms, and social media.
Instead, we “hear” the authorial expertise of universities, its academics and activists perceiving the institutional church as a type of secular government, its laws and structures onerous, its catechetical discourse triggering.
Something is amiss.
In the North American document, for example, Catholics are encouraged to “imitate Mary.” Why? Because, the authors tell us, Mary “continually said ‘yes’ to the invitation to contribute to the building up of the Kingdom of God.”
Left unsaid is Mary’s indispensable contribution, her Yes to motherhood. How does this omission happen in a Catholic gathering?
In that document — where the leadership role of women in the church is of such paramount concern to most everyone involved — the role of mother and wife in the domestic church is not addressed. Nor is the role of father and husband. Likewise, in the Vatican’s Instrumentum Laboris.
As in the culture, so too in the Synod.
Where is the Catholic Church, the Defender of Marriage and Family, at This Moment of Social and Cultural Collapse in the West?
In large part, that Church will be found in Africa, where some 20 percent of the current worldwide Catholic population resides, where churches are filled on Sundays, and where children are brought into the world male and female, as God has created them.
Africa’s synod chose to dispense with the Vatican-suggested theme — Isaiah’s Enlarge the Space of Your Tent — because of the tent’s association with the chaos of warfare, flight, and displacement. Instead, the Church in Africa selected as its theme The Family of God. “The family,” says their document, “is an important structure in the promotion of the synodal Church and demands pastoral care that focuses on marriage and family and their challenges in present-day Africa.”
At the invitation of Pope Francis, Fr. Martin is participating in this fall’s Synod, along with the four American cardinals who contributed affirming blurbs to Building a Bridge.
I do take heart that the Synod will also be hearing many individual voices from Africa, where the family is treasured, the threats to it are appreciated, and the Catholic Church remains a sign of contradiction.