Vatican City, Sep 20, 2018 / 12:01 pm (CNA).- A coalition of secular and dissenting Catholic LGBT groups aims to influence the Church’s upcoming Synod on Young People by rallying the like-minded to write to the synod to contend that the “rules” of the Catholic Church are causing “damage” to those who self-identify as LGBT.
But this effort misunderstands the more profound Catholic approach to human nature and identity, commentators have said.
Ann Schneible, communications director for the Courage apostolate, said Catholic teaching insists that everyone has the fundamental identity “to be the creature of God, and by grace, his child and heir to eternal life.”
“Seen from this perspective, it becomes clear that the Church’s approach provides the most compassionate response to people, including youth and young adults, who experience same sex attractions,” Schneible told CNA. “Far from being a misfortune or a disappointment, their identity as sons and daughters of God – who are made in his image and likeness, and have received divine grace and a call to holiness – is a profound and life-giving joy.”
Those who experience same-sex attraction deserve compassionate outreach from Catholics, she said, adding, “we do so in the belief and hope that following God’s plan will always lead one to happiness and ultimate fulfillment.”
Schneible spoke in response to a messaging effort from the Equal Future website, launched Aug. 22 at an event held parallel to the World Meeting of Families in Dublin. It is soliciting Catholics and non-Catholics to send messages to their regions’ delegates to the Synod of Bishops on Young People, the Faith and the Discernment of Vocations, to be held Oct. 3-28.
The default text for the message alleges that there is “damage done to children when they are given the sense that to be LGBT would be a misfortune or disappointment.”
The website instructions ask writers to “respectfully explain why you feel children are still getting that sense, and the role played by the rules of the Catholic Church and/or of other organizations in society.”
It says letters to the delegates should ask them to consider the letter-writer’s story at the synod, and should ask for a reply. The letter submission form asks whether the writer was baptized Catholic. Answers include “prefer not to say.”
Daniel Mattson, a Catholic speaker and author of “Why I Don’t Call Myself Gay,” reflected on the Equal Future campaign.
“I think the Church needs to do a much better job in reaching out to those who identify as LGBT. As one who used to see myself as a gay man, I’ve come to realize how empty the promises of the LGBT movement are,” he told CNA.
According to Mattson, the Church must proclaim her teachings as “truly good news, even when we fear that truth might be offensive.” He cited Christ’s encounter with the rich young man, in which Christ’s response made the young man go away sad.
“For a time, I went away sad, but I’m grateful no one in my life who truly loved me ever told me that the life I was living was morally acceptable! We never love anyone by not inviting them to live a moral life. Not all will go away sad, either.”
Mattson stressed the need for a “call to conversion” and to remember, “we can never be more compassionate than Jesus.” He also warned against “the willful refusal to speak about the health damages of living out a life of active homosexuality, particularly among men.”
“In nearly every area of both mental and physical health, the LGBT community suffers more profoundly than their heterosexual counterparts,” he said.
At least 60 groups from around the world are backing the Equal Future campaign. These include secular groups such as the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, GLSEN, Music4Children.org, and ALL OUT.
The Global Network of Rainbow Catholics, the U.S.-based New Ways Ministry, and Dignity USA are also named as backers of the project. Catholic authorities including the late Cardinal Francis George of Chicago have rejected New Ways Ministry’s self-identification as a Catholic group.
The director of the Equal Future campaign is Tiernan Brady of Ireland, who was director of the successful referenda in Ireland and Australia to give legal recognition to gay marriage. He told the Financial Times that his campaign targeting the Catholic Church will draw on practices from the Irish and Australian campaigns.
“I think one of the things we’ve found in all these campaigns is we can talk about rights all we want, but it’s human stories that people understand and that appeal to people’s humanity,” Brady said.
He said the initial inclusion of same-sex couples’ photos in literature for the World Meeting of Families suggested that there was already sympathy for such couples at the Vatican, even though the photos were later removed. Brady argued the Church will end up campaigning “against the sons and daughters of the men and women in your pews,” and churchgoers won’t understand it.
For Schneible, it is important to let each person tell their story.
“But we do not stop there,” she said. “As Catholic Christians, we believe that we must always seek to understand our own stories in light of the Gospel, the story of salvation”
The wider discussion often ignores people who have same-sex attractions and embrace chastity, she said.
“Too often they are dismissed by members of the LGBT community as being dishonest, or self-hating, or deluded,” Schneible continued. “On the contrary, these courageous men and women testify that, as much happiness and pleasure as they seemed to have when they were pursuing same sex relationships, they have found a deeper joy, peace and freedom by embracing the call to chastity. They make many sacrifices in order to remain faithful, but many of them speak of the closeness they have found with Christ as they walk this path to holiness.”
One backer of the Equal Future campaign, Dignity USA, has taken several six figure grants from Jon Stryker’s Arcus Foundation to support the Equally Blessed Coalition, which includes New Ways Ministry. A 2014 grant targeted the Synod on the Family and World Youth Day, aiming “to support pro-LGBT faith advocates to influence and counter the narrative of the Catholic Church and its ultra-conservative affiliates.”
The foundation has given more than $390,000 to the European Forum of LGBT Christian Groups for several activities, including advocacy related to the Synod on the Family. These activities include the forum’s response to “homophobic Catholic church family synod decisions” and efforts to “pursue its successful strategy of shifting traditional views.” The grants also fund the drafting, testing, and use of “a counter-narrative to traditional values,” according to the forum’s annual report and grant announcements from the U.S.-based foundation.
The foundation is also a grant maker to the Catholics United Education Fund, Catholics for Choice, and the Center for American Progress. It funded groups in ecclesial communities, including Episcopalian groups amid the breakup of the Anglican Communion over issues such as ecclesial authority and homosexuality.
The working document for the 2018 synod discusses increasing cultural instability and violent conflicts, but also that many young people, both inside and outside of the Church, are divided when it comes to topics related to sexuality, the role of women, and the need to be more welcoming to members of the LGBT community.
The document only briefly addresses the issue of homosexuality and related topics, saying that some LGBT youth who offered contributions to the synod’s general secretariat said they want to experience “greater closeness and greater care on the part of the Church.”
In their responses, bishops’ conferences also questioned how to respond to young people who have chosen to live a homosexual lifestyle, but who also want “to be close to the Church.”
Lisbeth Melendez Rivera, the Human Rights Campaign’s director of faith outreach and training, writing June 29 at the campaign’s website, has contended that aligned Catholics and LGBT activists “oscillate between hope and frustration” under Pope Francis. She said they have found some of his comments to be hurtful, such as the nature of the family as based on the union of man and woman.
At the same time, she welcomed Father James Martin, S.J.’s appearance at a workshop on LGBT bridge-building held at the World Meeting of Families in Dublin, which was organized by Cardinal Kevin Farrell.
For Rivera, the addition of “LGBT” as a descriptor in the working document for the upcoming Synod on Youth was “perhaps the most important development in recent weeks.”
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Today’s Church hides its head like an ostrich and wants to be a doormat Christianity. But this has been going on for centuries. This gave rise to the Crusades, which were valiant and manly Christian efforts to stop the religion of peace from destroying Christianity. All these following areas s were once majority Christian: Egypt (90% Copts until the religion of peace came in the seventh century); Israel, Lebanon, the Palestinian territory, Syria (where Christians were first called Christians!), Anatolia (today’s Turkey), North Africa (the land of Tertullian and St. Cyprian of Carthage, St. Athanasius of Alexandria and St. Augustine of Hippo!)…there were even Christian (and Jewish) enclaves in Arabia. Then came the religion of peace in the seventh century and in a century turned all these places into religion of peace majority. In Egypt alone, Christian now make up less than 10% and continue to be persecuted and oppressed). Only Greece, Armenia and Spain ever managed to recover their Christianity after being conquered for many years by the religion of peace. Western Europe will be next to fall in a few decades just from its self-inflicted demographic conquest. See below historian R. Ibrahim account of the persecution of Christians just in the last few decades. Lamentably, neither most of the media nor even CWR mention all of these:
‘We Were Commanded [by Allah] to Kill You!’ The Muslim Persecution of Christians, June 2025
https://www.raymondibrahim.com/2025/07/28/we-were-commanded-by-allah-to-kill-you-the-muslim-persecution-of-christians-june-2025/
So what to do? Peter was told to lay down his sword.
a) The Church does not forbid self-defense: even to the point of killing the attacker who wants to kill your family, yourself, your society, see the Catechism of the Catholic Church and St. Thomas Aquinas on Just War
http://www.catholiclane.com/the-catechism-on-the-right-of-self-defense/
b) The Church allows for Just War; see among many, the work of St. Thomas Aquinas
c) Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek (Sermon on the Mount); but this is an individual action of Christian forgiveness. He does not command Christians to not fight and instead let their wives be raped and enslaved, their children and family and friends and fellow Christians be enslaved or killed and so forth.
d) He does not tell the Roman centurion (officer commanding 100 roman soldiers) to go and stop carrying weapons and fighting and killing people if the duly constituted government tells him to do so. He actually helps the centurion by healing the centurion’s servant. See Matthew 5: 8ff
e) Jesus himself uses violence to promote justice when he overturn the tables and possessions of the money lenders and merchants at the temple.
f) “In Luke 22:36, Jesus tells His remaining disciples, “If you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.” Jesus knew that now was the time when His followers would be threatened, and He upheld their right to self-defense. Just a short time later, Jesus is arrested, and Peter takes a sword and cuts off someone’s ear. Jesus rebukes Peter for that act (verses 49–51). Why? In his zeal to defend the Lord, Peter was standing in the way of God’s will. Jesus had told His disciples multiple times that He must be arrested, put on trial, and die (e.g., Matthew 17:22–23). In other words, Peter acted unwisely in that situation. We must have wisdom regarding when to fight and when not to.” (gotquestions.org/self-defense.html)
g) St. Paul nowhere tells soldiers to depose their weapons and not to fight to protect their society.
h) Again, the Christian must use judgment as to when to forgive verbal and even physical assault and when to respond with deadly force to defend himself, his family, his fellow Christians, and his society in general.
i) Again, the Church does not forbid self-defense. That is why Pope Urban II organized the First Crusade in response to Eastern Roman Emperor
Alexius I Comnenos request for help to fight off the relentless advance of the religion of peace.
See historian R. Ibrahim book Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Christianity and Islam at
https://www.amazon.com/Sword-Scimitar-Fourteen-Centuries-between/dp/0306825554/ref=pd_bxgy_d_sccl_1/135-8389023-4202224?pd_rd_w=buGLk&content-id=amzn1.sym.dcf559c6-d374-405e-a13e-133e852d81e1&pf_rd_p=dcf559c6-d374-405e-a13e-133e852d81e1&pf_rd_r=HPXKFKPRGHR30J7RNR2X&pd_rd_wg=MauWm&pd_rd_r=1f59df96-dfee-4d7a-a78a-f602f92fcbee&pd_rd_i=0306825554&psc=1
See also these scholarly interviews by CWR Fr. Connolly:
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2020/12/16/the-forgotten-history-of-christian-slavery-under-islam/
https://www.thepostil.com/christian-slavery-under-islam-a-conversation-with-dario-fernandez-morera/
Neither Parolin nor anyone else at the Vatican would have called out Islamic jihad for an act of terrorism during the reign of Francis. Most of the time, there was no comment at all after one of these attacks in Africa. It’s subtle and incremental, but there has been some improvement since Leo has taken over. It is probably more a testament to how bad it was under Francis. I am grateful that at least some degree of moral decency has been restored.
We read: “For [Cardinal Parolin], this group is a force ‘that in practice represents Islamic jihad and that imposes itself through force and violence’.”
About the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly the Belgian Congo), yours truly is reminded of Joseph Conrad’s “The Heart of Darkness”(1899), where ivory hunters show that beneath the veneer of European rationalism and the Enlightenment, they are capable of sinking into an abyss of cruelty and beastiality not seen even in animals.
Instead, a profound darkness of heart” in a fallen world, and the jungle world of “impenetrable darkness,” feed upon each other. The narrator says of Mr. Kurtz:” I was curious to see whether this man who had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort would climb to the top after all and how he would set about his work there.” Then, a few pages later: “Hadn’t I been told in all the tones of jealousy and admiration that he had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory than all the other agents together.” And, of the system: “What saves us is efficiency—the devotion to efficiency.” About this deity, Kurtz’s last dying words: “the horror, the horror.”
The horror of reason detached from faith, and in the Congo of jihadist belief amputated from reason. Pope Benedict was onto something when we delivered the Regensburg Lecture (2006), more than an off-the-cuff meme, with a dual message to the West and to the encroaching domain of Islam. https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg.html
Against the moral bankruptcy of modern efficiency and of jihadist finality, both, today the Church has the historic calling to propose the reality of the historic and historical Incarnation (the actual event)—the unity of both the fully human and the fully divine in Jesus Christ, and this unity eternally within the unity of the Triune One.
SUMMARY: “Christ the Lord…by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to himself and makes his supreme calling clear” (Gaudium et Spes, The Church in the Modern World, n. 22). Is it a true “sign of the times” that we must get past the navel gazing roundtables and even the 15 expert study groups on “hot button issues,” none of which had even a single word to say about fatalistic Islam or unchecked jihad.
“’This is a dangerous sign,’ Parolin declared.”, as he sits safely tucked away in the Vatican fortress, totally isolated from the rest of suffering humanity. People who flap their gums and do nothing, as does this Prince of the Church, are worthless.
Moslems consider themselves the enemy of and ultimate conqueror of Christianity. Their long game, as directed by Muhammad himself, is to immigrate mass populations of Moslems to Cristian countries in order to reach the point that they are the largest population group, at which time they will implement sharia law. At that juncture, they can and will force the remaining population to either convert to Islam or be put to death.
Mamdami, the radical candidate running for mayor of New York City, is neither a communist nor a liberal socialist. He is a radical Islamist. He seeks nothing more or less than the Islamification of the United States of America.
We let the enemy in of our own naive free will.
Islamists have slaughtered nearly every Catholic in Nigeria. Now, they have begun open warfare on the Catholics in the Congo. They won’t stop until we decide that they need to be stopped. The burden of this battle falls on us who are willing to witness to Jesus Christ in our words, in our actions and, if it be God’s will, with our very lives.
The enemies of God are not just on some remote continent. They are there as well as here, in our own cherished homeland.
“Slaughtered nearly every Catholic in Nigeriia” – gross hyperbole?
No it’s not’gross hyperbole’ it is a statement to wake up people like you. Christians are being slaughtered throughput Africa and the ME. Meanwhile smug chumps in the safe west sit in relative safety. Have you been to the East End of London or any port city in France? The barbarians have breached the gate and the sad pathetic fact is that people like you prefer to stone their own side.
Alice, I’m not in any way disputing or minimizing the seriousness of world wide persecution of Christians. This is a sad fact and must be taken seriously. What I am disturbed with is the many very inaccurate statements being made . To say that Catholics have been practically wiped out in Nigeria is very misleading since there are currently over 25 million living there. This is clearly a case of gross hyperbole.
Not to worry. As long as the religion of peace stays over there.
These are the same barbarian Muslims our Church hierarchy has chosen to get into bed with. The consequences are predictable.
Many Catholics murdered by Muslims on July 27th in the Congo, and the Vatican spokesman says , “This is a dangerous sign.”
Three Christian residents of Gaza are accidentally killed and we get weeks long verbal attacks on Israel.
There is no balance. No matter what the Chinese do to Catholics/christians, or Muslims do to Catholics/christians the Vatican does not call them out by name.
As to the phrase “radical Islam” we should take the Turkish president at his word when he said there is no radical Islam, only Islam.
Indeed. And notice too how the Vatican obfuscates by bringing in Israel and the “Palestinians” in comments about the murder of Christians by the religion of peace in the Cogo to avoid stating the true nature of the problem. Very depressing to see that in the Vatican plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose.
Master of understatement…so have been the massacres in Nigeria and the mid east,and elsewhere…not to mention the persecution in China, of which you are one of the architects