By Fr. Gerald E. Murray

The Catholic Church is accustomed to attacks upon her teaching. The history of heresy over the centuries reveals the never-ending efforts of those who seek to replace Catholic doctrine with various errors. What the Church has only recently become accustomed to is attacks upon her teaching coming from some of her shepherds, especially from the never-ending pronouncements emanating from the office of the Synod of Bishops.

The latest imposition of the Synod is the recently published full-fledged endorsement of the homosexual lifestyle in the Final Report of Study Group Number 9 "Theological Criteria and Synodal Methodologies for Shared Discernment of Emerging Doctrinal, Pastoral, and Ethical Issues."

This report attempts to dismiss Catholic teaching on the inherent immorality of homosexual acts – and the disordered nature of the homosexual inclination – by stigmatizing that teaching as the expression of an obsolete "paradigm" that no longer can be relied upon to communicate God's will to His people.

Merriam-Webster defines paradigm as "a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated." To describe Catholic teaching using the analogy of a framework upon which theories and experiments are arranged is to demote it from the realm of truth into just one possible approach to presenting God's revelation. Jesus said, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." (John 14:6) Is that a paradigm needing improvement?

The report includes two appendices, which are testimonies in the form of an interview. Two Catholic men (the first Portuguese, the second American), each proudly describing himself as being married to a man, even though the Catholic Church teaches that such a thing is impossible. Why would the Synod of Bishops publish interviews with men who reject Catholic teaching on the nature of marriage, inspired as it is by the Holy Spirit, as part of its effort to discern the workings of the Holy Spirit in the Church today?

Report Number 9 gives us the answer – the Synod considers so-called homosexual marriage to be an open question:

Finally, while listening to the Word of God lived in the Church, it is necessary to address with parrhesia the currently recurring question of whether one can speak of "marriage" in relation to persons with same-sex attractions, equating their relationship to heterosexual conjugal union without recognizing the differences. These include, primarily, the evident impossibility of procreation per se linked to sexual difference, regarding which techniques of medically assisted procreation pose further difficulties.

Even worse, Report Number 9 considers all Catholic teaching as subject to change:

The Church's mission is not a matter of abstractly proclaiming and deductively applying principles that are set out in an immutable and rigid manner, but of fostering a living encounter with the person of the risen Lord Jesus, by engaging with the lived experience of faith of the People of God in its personal and social relevance, in relation to the diverse situations of life and the many cultural contexts. Only the fruitful tension between what has been established in the Church's doctrine and her pastoral practice and the practices of life in which what has been established is verified, in the exercise of personal and communal life in the light of the Gospel, expresses the generative dynamism of Tradition: against the temptation of the sterile and regressive ossification of principles and statements, of norms and rules, regardless of the experience of individuals and communities.

"The lived experience of faith of the People of God" can overrule the doctrine of the Faith? Welcome to the ecclesiastical embrace of "liquid modernity" in which metaphysical realism is cast aside, and the dictatorship of relativism and subjectivism subjects everything to redefiniti...