LGBTQ+ Synod Report Continues to Garner Praise

Positive reactions to the Synod on Synodality’s Study Group 9 Report continue to appear from Catholic LGBTQ+ leaders who hail  its inclusive language, and incorporation of lived-experience testimonials.

James Alison

Openly gay priest/theologian James Alison penned an insightful commentary on the report for The Tablet, saying he was “impressed” and that the report’s first 22 pages are “worth a read” even for people not interested in LGBTQ+ issues. He gave his reason for this endorsement: 

“I think it the best theological explanation of the thinking behind synodality that I have seen to date. If anyone can give any answer to the ‘How’s the Pope going to do it?’ question I asked in 2013, concerning unity and avoiding schism, then this document is the most hopeful road plan I know.”

The authors’ method has been a “shift from an aprioristic manner of solving ‘problems’, . . . to the inductive method which Francis, and many others, have called for.” And this method of analysis: “takes one of the hardest cases in current Church disputes, and uses it to construct a paradigm for how we can move from one set of attitudes to another as part of our attending to the Kerygma and the life in the Spirit without loss of faithfulness to the Gospel.”

The authors’ choice to identify their topic as studying “emergent reality,’ rather than “controversial issues,” they made much more than a semantic leap. Alison explains:

“By wrestling with such a reality together, we learn to be human, and thus to be Church. This is faithful to Francis’ constant reminders that reality is greater than ideas.”

Alison also praised the authors’ decision to “flesh out the principle of pastorality”:

“To their enormous credit they do so without running away from the difficult truth questions which arise, and which can’t be brushed over by just being ‘kind’. You can’t genuinely be loving to people without helping them to live in the truth. So learning and pastorality invariably go together. The whole document might be described as ‘a theological anthropology of ecclesial learning’.”

In a separate Tablet article, reporter Sarah MacDonald support groups like DignityUSA applauded the report for showing optimistic possibilities for LGBTQ+ people and their families. 

Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA,  appreciated the report’s openness to learning about peoples’ faith lives and lived experiences, which highlighted through decades of testimony that many consider their sexuality a blessing and a gift.

“To see this reality reflected and respected in this document is a long-awaited positive step,” Duddy-Burke said.However, she did criticize the report for no doctrinal changes and a lack of concrete recommendations to move forward with; instead, focusing on reflection and dialogue.

“The paradigm shift repeatedly called for in this report is a significant and very welcome change,” she said. “This kind of dialogue and engagement are exactly what DignityUSA, LGBTQ+ Catholics, families, and frontline ministers have been calling for, and offering to the larger church, for decades.”

MacDonald’s report also quoted extensively from the reaction statement of the LGBT+ Catholics Westminster’s pastoral council. Bondings 2.0 reported on this statement last week, and you can read that post by clicking here. 

MacDonald also acknowledged that not all quarters of the church are praising the report, citing comments made by Cardinal Gerhard Müller, former Prefect of the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith from 2012 to 2017.

Müller said that the report is an example of a “comfortable and world-conforming Christianity,” and that the LGBT lobby within the Church is openly welcoming such “heretical relativisation of natural and sacramental marriage.”

While there may be some criticizing the report, many are left wondering ‘what’s next’ as support groups like DignityUSA wonder “how the ongoing work of engaging in dialogue and discernment the document calls for will occur.”

—Matthew Gorczyka, New Ways Ministry, May 21, 2026

For Bondings 2.0’s previous posts about the report from Study Group 9, click here.