What the Vatican Just Released on Gay Catholics — and Where Pope Leo Stands
An explainer on Study Group 9’s final report, the two testimonies that surprised everyone, and the synodal process Pope Leo XIV is letting run.
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On May 5, three days before the first anniversary of Pope Leo XIV’s election, the Vatican released a document with a title built to put readers to sleep: “Theological Criteria and Synodal Methodologies for Shared Discernment of Emerging Doctrinal, Pastoral, and Ethical Issues.”
Within forty-eight hours, James Martin had called it historic, Cardinal Gerhard Müller had branded it heretical, and Father Gerald Murray, speaking on EWTN, used the word horrific.
The reason is buried in two appendices.
Here is what Study Group 9 is, and what its report actually does.
The body and the assignment
Study Group 9 is one of ten committees Pope Francis spun out of the Synod on Synodality in early 2024.
Each was handed a question the synod assembly could not finish in the room. Group 9 drew the hardest topic — what the Vatican initially labeled “controversial doctrinal, pastoral, and ethical issues.” Same-sex relations sat at the top of the list. The role of women, divorce and remarriage, and questions of conscience were also on the docket.
The group’s chair is Cardinal Carlos Gustavo Castillo Mattasoglio, the Peruvian archbishop of Lima. Robert Prevost — the missionary who spent nearly four decades in Peru before becoming Pope Leo XIV — knows him well.
The committee’s first symbolic act came before publication. It renamed its own assignment. “Controversial issues” became “emerging issues.” Group 9 wrote that the change was meant to register a “paradigm shift” away from a Church that hands down rulings and toward a Church that learns by listening.
What the report says
Most of the report is procedural. It argues that Catholic moral reasoning should begin with the lived experience of the faithful rather than with abstract principles applied downward. The committee calls this the “principle of pastorality” and traces the term to Vatican II and to John XXIII’s opening address at the council.
The document changes nothing in Catholic doctrine. No new moral pronouncement on homosexuality appears, no same-sex unions are blessed, and the Catechism is left intact.
What Group 9 proposes is a method: theological commissions at the diocesan and national level should sit with LGBT Catholics, hear them out, study the relevant scripture passages, consult the human sciences, and report back through the synodal structure. The implementation timeline runs from this summer through an Ecclesial Assembly at the Vatican in October 2028.
The novelty is in two annexes.
For the first time in a Vatican document, two gay men were given space to speak in their own voices, without an intermediary. Their names were withheld in the published text, but the U.S. testimony belongs to Jason Steidl-Jack, a theologian at Fordham who has written publicly about his life and his marriage.
The Portuguese author recounts a spiritual director who “suggested I could have been married to a woman to ‘find peace’ and ‘use my gifts,’ since marriage is not ‘just about sexuality.’”
He calls the advice “a suggestion to harm a woman by robbing her of the chance to be completely loved and desired, all to fulfill a social expectation.” Steidl-Jack writes from the other side of the ocean: “My sexuality isn’t a perversion, disorder, or cross; it’s a gift from God. I have a happy, healthy marriage and am flourishing as an openly gay Catholic.”
The report does not bury the Courage accusation. The ministry is identified on the page.
“The testimony first describes the problematic membership in a Catholic group (Courage) which, by pushing for ‘reparative therapy,’ had the effect of separating faith and sexuality,” the document reads.
Steidl-Jack tells the story in his own words: “I joined Courage, an apostolate that works with those who ‘suffer from same-sex attraction.’ The group came at the suggestion of a conversion therapist I met to deal with my ‘condition.’”
The meetings, he writes, were “secretive and hidden. The people I met were lonely, hopeless, and often depressed.”
The report, drawing across both testimonies, describes what it calls “the devastating effects of reparative therapies aimed at recovering heterosexuality” and the “contradictory advice received” from clergy — from those who push reparative therapy to those who, “even more gravely,” counsel a gay man to enter the sacrament of marriage with a woman.
The pushback
Within ten days of publication, the General Secretariat of the Synod issued a statement that the reports “cannot be attributed to the General Secretariat” and described them as “working documents.”
The Secretariat said its role had been “limited solely to the translation of the summaries, the editing of the reports and their publication and dissemination, in order to be consistent with the spirit of transparency and accountability that has characterized the synodal process.” Critics read this as a quiet washing of hands.
Then came the Sister Josée Ngalula problem. The Congolese theologian who served as the lone African member of Study Group 9 told the National Catholic Register that she did not help draft the homosexuality text.
Sister Ngalula said she focused on the report’s section on non-violence — closer to “my African context, shaped by wars” — and declined to enter the debate on homosexual persons because, in her telling, “this is not a major pastoral issue in my community.”
The committee that proposed listening to LGBT Catholics ended up hearing only from two men.
Steidl-Jack himself names the absence inside the published testimony. “Patriarchy is a problem for my lesbian Catholic sisters,” he writes. “While gay men may feel at home in my parish, lesbian Catholics are often ignored. Few gay women attend because they see no one in leadership who can relate to their experiences. The Body of Christ is hurting because these women are overlooked.”
In my mind, none of this lessens the significance of the document. It reminds me of what Pope Leo XIV has already said more than once.
As part of his Magna Carta address to synod working groups last October, Leo told the Church that “we have to understand that we do not all run at the same speed, and sometimes we have to be patient with one another, rather than a few people running ahead and leaving a lot behind, which could cause even a break in an ecclesial experience.”
He had been more direct a month earlier, in a September interview with Crux pegged to Elise Allen’s biography, as Outreach summarized: “I think we have to change attitudes before we even think about changing what the Church says about any given question.”
Michael Lofton, the conservative Catholic apologist at Reason & Theology, flagged the pattern in a video last fall. Leo was telling the Church the order of operations: a change of heart precedes a change of text.
I have written about this theme before — in November, when I covered Pope Leo’s meeting with a prominent married gay couple in Rome, and in December, with his appointment of an LGBTQ-affirming bishop to lead the Diocese of Monterey.
Brian and Alex, the Monterey appointment, and Study Group 9 share the same architecture: a public gesture, a private pastoral message, no doctrinal text changed. The Church is being asked to learn what its people are actually living before it tries to write down what it believes about them.
Where Pope Leo XIV stands
Leo has issued no statement on the report. The text was published over the Vatican seal — neither endorsed nor blocked by the pope. But we do have a good sense of where he stands on it. Here’s the evidence.
