Outreach asked some of the world’s leading Catholic theologians and scholars to reflect on the import of the work of Study Group 9: what it means for the church and for LGBTQ Catholics. We hope this series helps you as well to reflect on this group’s important work. Read more from Outreach’s series here.
I recently came across a reel on social media that used a photo-editing program to make the actor Pedro Pascal’s face perfectly symmetrical. The content creator reasoned that beauty hinges on symmetry. In fact, the edits totally distorted Pascal’s features, making him seem artificial, like a bad Ken doll or an influencer from the manosphere that has had too much work done. I can’t put my finger on it, but it definitely looked way worse than Pedro Pascal does in real life.
Then again, as an ecclesiologist, I think I can put my finger on it (stay with me). The theologian Anne Carr wrote in a 1985 essay that the Second Vatican Council moved the church away from “static, idealized notions of perfection” and toward the ambiguity, and messiness, of history. How did the Council do this? By paying attention not only to the “deposit of faith,” (a phrase used to refer to what Catholics have believed through the centuries) which sounds like something in the back room of a bank or something you might FedEx, but also to contemporary scholarship, and most importantly to the lived reality of the people of God.
Why did the Council do this? In opening up the windows of the church to let in the fresh air of contemporary reality, Pope St. John XXIII and the council fathers were looking to find new ways to experience the reality of God, who works in and through the messy world, and cannot be circumscribed within neat philosophical categories. Latinx theologians put it this way: You are more likely to meet God in the everyday (lo cotidiano) than you are in the extraordinary, lightning-bolt moments. Aquinas said it thus: Grace builds on nature. God is in the messiness of history, the Incarnation comes to us, Emmanuel means “God-with-us.”
You are more likely to meet God in the everyday (lo cotidiano) than you are in the extraordinary, lightning-bolt moments.
It makes sense, then, that Pope Francis would call the church to a new synodal way of being, which involves first and foremost listening to one another. The church continues to seek God out in the everyday—in this case, the everyday experiences of people across the global reality that is the church The synod, potentially the largest worldwide exercise in consultation, has already borne great fruit not just in ecclesial vibes or attitudes but in the Final Synod report, which Pope Francis adopted into the magisterium. Also helpful in moving the church forward are the final reports from each of the 15 study groups. The report from Study Group 9 outlines for us an important ecclesiological and theological methodology: narrative as a source of self-understanding for the church.
The report begins with a reflection on the so-called “Council of Jerusalem” narrated in Acts 10-15. There, we learn of some of the earliest doctrinal crises to arise in the community of Jesus’ followers. The controversies concerned how closely Christians must adhere to Jewish law—how far outside the Law was too far to be in community? There were no easy answers, and moving forward together meant deep disagreement about the identity of a newly-forged community. Much about that early crisis looks “wrong” to contemporary eyes, but especially the fact that Peter, whom Catholics revere as the “first pope” lost the “how Jewish do we need to be” fight, soundly. Paul, not Peter, won the day, and Christians have forgone most Jewish dietary, purity and circumcision laws ever since.
Why include a story like that in the Acts of the Apostles, and what does it mean for the church today? It is, to some eyes, an embarrassing narrative of disunity and confusion among the earliest community that understood itself to be Christian. It tells us first that the church has never been without controversy. We have always just been trying, to the best of our ability, to figure it out. We do this by journeying together, step by faltering step, in the messiness of life.
The inclusion of the arguments surrounding the Council of Jerusalem also tells us that the faith is always already in-process and never fixed, and that the truth that we follow is a person: Jesus, who entered into the ambiguity of history not with a list of unambiguous answers but with compassionate love. This is why Scripture, the foundation of our faith, and especially the New Testament, is not a list of propositions or truths that we check our compliance with and then move about our lives. Instead, the Gospels, the Epistles, Acts and Revelation all include stories that are meant to move us to action, yes, but to do so in ways that require discernment.
The decision of SG9 to include first-hand testimony of LGBTQ-identifying Catholics in the final report, and therefore in the teaching of the church, represents a new Council of Jerusalem moment.
Today, the church still navigates many controversies, some of which were the subject of Study Group 9. By including stories of LGBTQ Catholics, their suffering and also (more importantly) where they find grace in their lives, the synod writers/editors are inviting us to a new moment of discernment. In the face of someone else’s life story, how will we respond? How did Jesus respond when someone reached out in faith to him? Not with a checklist, but with interest, compassion, and care.
Thus, the decision of SG9 to include first-hand testimony of LGBTQ-identifying Catholics in the final report, and therefore in the teaching of the church, represents a new Council of Jerusalem moment. This moment does not shy away from the difficulties of figuring out how best to be a people of God amid the exclusion, pain and suffering of our historical moment, nor does it forestall dialogical encounter between people who fall into different “camps” regarding the appropriate use or formulation of doctrine about human sexuality. It leaves the ambiguous messiness in there, as a place of encounter. This ambiguous mess that we call history is rarely neatly packaged, easily solved or symmetrical in our lifetimes.
Like Pedro Pascal’s face, it is far more real, and far more beautiful that way.
