A new report from the Vatican’s Synod on Synodality is incredibly deceptive because it buries the biblical truth about homosexual acts as grave sins meriting damnation under an avalanche of woke propaganda and confusing statements on “pastorality.”
Of course Jesus ate and spoke with sinners. He also always told them to repent (e.g., John 8:11, Mark 1:15, Luke 13:3) or they would “perish.” True charity has compassion on the sinner to the end of saving his soul, not of giving him a comfortable or pleasurable material life. That is what the report from the Synod on Synodality misses. It plays up how difficult it is for some people to be chaste when they have homosexual desires. The problem is that reaching heaven might indeed require great sacrifice and suffering. Jesus said that Christians must take up their crosses (Matthew 16:24) and rejoice when they suffer (Matthew 5). And since both the Old and New Testaments explicitly and repeatedly condemn active homosexuality as a perversion and sin so grave that it excludes one from heaven, the incontrovertible scriptural teaching is that homosexual acts can never be justifiable.
First of all, Catholic doctrine does not consist in whatever the pope or a group of bishops happens to say. It must always be in accord with Scripture and the words of Christ as handed down by the apostles, and any doctrinal statement must meet certain conditions in canon law to be so called. There have been popes who have said things in contradiction with doctrine going all the way back to the fourth century Arian crisis at least, because not everything a pope says is directly inspired by the Holy Spirit. The same goes for synodal reports like the one I’m challenging today.
Now let’s look at the actual biblical verses that address homosexuality. Genesis 19 with God‘s complete destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah for the sin of sodomy or homosexuality is probably the most famous one, but there are numerous others.
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St. Paul, for instance, states:
Who changed the truth of God into a lie; and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. For this cause God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error…Who, having known the justice of God, did not understand that they who do such things, are worthy of death; and not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them. —Romans 1:25-27, 32
St. Paul also addresses homosexuality in the First Letter to the Corinthians (6:9-10), where he lists sins that merit eternal exclusion from Heaven: "Do not err: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor liers with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor railers, nor extortioners, shall possess the kingdom of God." The Greek word translated here as "liers with mankind," ἀρσενοκοῖται, means literally “men engaged in sexual activity with the same sex.”
The Old Testament also references and condemns homosexuality. I already mentioned Genesis 19, and Leviticus 18:22 says, “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”
Notably, the executive summary for the synodal report only references Scripture twice, and then not verses dealing with homosexual acts. The same goes for the report itself, which mentions some Scripture verses, but none of the ones discussing homosexuality. The report does complain about “homophobia and transphobia” based on a “traditionalist” Bible reading that excludes “‘healing and inclusion,’” as if denying a wound exists is healing. Of course, the report also has a section without any mention of the saints or the apostles, but holding up serial adulterer Martin Luther King Jr. as a model.
In short, the whole synodal report does no good but a great deal of harm, for it manages to produce dozens of pages on homosexuality without ever addressing the most essential element: the biblical view on homosexual acts.
