What Theology Looks Like When You Actually Engage Reality

Professor Daniel Horan

Today’s essay on the Synod on Synodality’s Study Group 9 report is by Daniel P. Horan, PhD is Professor of Philosophy, Religious Studies and Theology at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. A columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, he is the author or editor of sixteen books, including Catholicity and Emerging Personhood: A Contemporary Theological Anthropology, A White Catholic’s Guide to Racism and Privilege, and Fear and Faith: Hope and Wholeness in a Fractured World. He is co-host of  The Francis Effect Podcast.

For Professor Horan’s most recent essay on Bondings 2.0, click here.

For previous posts about the report from Study Group 9, click here.

The biggest Catholic LGBTQ+ news of the last month, and possibly of the past few years, has been the publication of the final report from the Vatican Synod’s “Study Group 9,” which was tasked with exploring, as the title suggests “Theological Criteria and Synodal Methodologies for Shared Discernment of Emerging Doctrinal, Pastoral, and Ethical Issues.” Admittedly, the title is wordy, but the content was decidedly focused. The study group considered questions related to what the document calls “the experience of people of faith with same-sex attractions” and “the experience of active non-violence by individuals and associations in situations of war.” 

Although the section on Christian nonviolence is important and timely, especially given the current state of international violence around the globe today, most of the media coverage has focused on the sections pertaining to the LGBTQ+ community, especially the inclusion of testimonies from two civilly married gay couples. And while there has been a lot of understandably paid attention already to these testimonies, I want to focus my reflection here on what the content of the report might mean for work of Catholic theology moving forward.

On the one hand, critics of the report’s contents (and of synodality more broadly) will emphasize that these reports do not bear the weight of something promulgated through the exercise of ordinary magisterium (e.g., the pope issuing a teaching for the universal church or a local bishop issuing a teaching for a particular diocese). Those who oppose LGBTQ+ inclusion in the church will protest that nothing doctrinally or ethically has “officially changed.” And, generally speaking, they are not wrong.

However, on the other hand, one thing this report does do in a meaningful way is lay out a path forward for theological and ethical reflection that takes seriously reality and the actual experiences of Catholics in the world. In fact, there is a page-long subsection titled “Paying attention to reality.”

What we see throughout the report is a genuine methodological development, reflected in the study group’s reframing “controversial issues” as “emerging issues,” which is a sign of hope because it does not present themes like sexuality and same-sex relationships as automatically condemnable, but rather a topic heretofore not substantially engaged as a serious issue. And while gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons have existed and have been in relationships for as long as human beings have existed, and therefore might strike some as odd to describe engaging questions related to queer lives as an “emerging issue,” it is new for church leaders to acknowledge not only the existence of queer people but also consider the possibility of the inherent goodness of queer love and relationships.

In order to arrive at the possibility of such insight and consideration a major barrier had to be overcome. This barrier was the persistent refusal to accept that queer people not only exist but also many live in good, just, equitable, and mutual relationships. The construction of this barrier was built on the foundation of an outmoded understanding of the human person, insisting that abstract Aristotelian-Thomistic frameworks that were articulated centuries before the emergence of modern science, psychology, and sociology are absolute, true, and unchanging.

This context is why passages like the following from the report are so revolutionary: 

“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.”

The important change here is that those in positions of church leadership are acknowledging what many theologians and ordinary Catholics alike have recognized for decades: doing theology in a vacuum, clinging to abstractions and hypothetical circumstances at the expense of actual lives, histories, cultures, and experiences, is not really theology at all. Or at least it’s not good theology.

Theologians have known for centuries that theological reflection is inadequate, sclerotic, and unhelpfully self-referential when reason and experience are not also included alongside scripture and tradition as sources for theology in a serious and rigorous way. And yet, so many of the formal teaching documents of the church —especially those addressing topics related to sexuality and gender at the global, regional, and local levels—have intentionally excluded the voices and experiences of the people most directly affected by these texts.

The Study Group 9 report describes the much-needed “paradigm shift” that both theology and pastoral ministry require today. Rather than trying to apply principles arrived at through abstraction and deductive reasoning, we ought to engage in a correlative project that brings together what the report calls our universal human “ultimate eschatological fulfilment” in Christ with “the concrete, varied, complex, ever-changing reality in which we live.” This process is just another way of reaffirming the teaching of the Second Vatican Council’s document Gaudium et Spes, which exhorts the church to interpret the “signs of the times” (that is, concrete reality) in the “light of the gospel” (that is, the revelation of our ultimate eschatological fulfilment).

When we approach theological questions through this lens, an authentically faithful and historically conscious framework, we discover that life is far more complicated than the one-size-fits-all, static, abstract answers we’re used to hearing would otherwise suggest. The Study Group 9 report affirms that “Every person, first and foremost, is singular, irreducible, irreplaceable, and original.” And we should begin and conclude our theological reflections with disciplined attention to this truth and the contexts in which we are asking and answering such important questions.

I find the methodological approach outlined in this report deeply hopeful, for it takes reality seriously and once you do that, you can’t go back to the falsity of the way things were imagined previously. Once you acknowledge the truth that the earth revolves around the sun, you can’t go back to a pre-Copernican universe; Once the truth of biological evolution is confirmed, you can’t go back to creationism; and once the truth of the complexity and diversity of human sexuality and relationships is witnessed, you can’t go back to denying its existence or implications. 

This is what the critics and reactionary Catholics most fear. On some level they already know that the Study Group report finally pulled back the curtain to reveal truths that anti-LGBTQ+ activists in the church have been desperately trying to conceal, ignore, or condemn. And since we can’t go back, let us go forward to engage in authentic theological reflection and pastoral ministry that is worthy of the name Christian. 

–Daniel P. Horan, St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, May 19, 2026