Cardinal condemns ‘dangerous ambiguity’ in Synod report on LGBT+ Catholics

The Study Group Nine report proposed ‘continuous theorisation and implementation’ of responses to ‘emerging issues’ such as ‘the lived experience of believers with same-sex attraction’.

The Archbishop of Utrecht Cardinal Willem Eijk criticised a report from a study group set up during the Synod on Synodality, which commented on the Church’s response to LGBT+ Catholics, as “a fundamental contradiction of Catholic teaching that demands a forceful response”.

“Homosexual acts are intrinsically evil – this is settled Catholic doctrine,” said Cardinal Eijk, a leading conservative voice in bioethical debates. “The authors’ failure to clarify this point creates dangerous ambiguity.”

In a commentary for the National Catholic Register, he argued the report “effectively normalises homosexual relationships within a Church context”. This “troubling departure” amounts to “a clear attempt to weaken the proclamation of Catholic moral teaching”.

One of the testimonies the report included said sessions of Courage, a Catholic group advocating chastity for LGBT+ people, “had the effect of separating faith and sexuality”. Courage International said the claim “mischaracterises Courage’s work” and it denied practising “reparative therapy”.

Eijk, a trained physician, mentioned this testimony in defending Courage International. The report’s emphasis on a “fruitful tension” between doctrine and practice “sounds pastoral and Christ-centred”, he wrote, but “conceals a radical departure from Catholic moral theology”.

He rejected the Synod’s ability to change this in any way. “The Church’s teaching is not obscure, nor is it subject to revision through synodal processes,” he wrote. “It is the truth that sets us free.”

Eijk continued: “This stems from a persistent misunderstanding that has plagued pastoral theology since the 1960s: the notion that pastoral care consists in finding compromises between the Church’s moral teaching and the concrete reality of people’s lives.”

He cited John Paul II, who rejected this view in his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor, arguing that Church teaching was “not only an ‘ideal’ which must then be adapted, proportioned, graduated to the so-called concrete possibilities of man”.

The Study Group’s report “must be forcefully refuted”, Eijk continued. “In the meantime, the faithful can be assured that a number of cardinals and bishops will make their objections known to the Roman Magisterium.”

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