What Remains of “Homosexualitatis Problema” 40 Years Later?

Introduction to the Series

“Forty Years in the Desert: LGBTQ+ People and the Ratzinger Letter”

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s Letter to the Bishops on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons. This document is known by several names. Although it was originally written in English, a first for a Vatican document, its Latin title is Homosexualitatis Problema, after the first few words of the document’s text–“The problem of homosexuality. . . . “–as is traditional for Vatican documents. It is also often referred to as “the Ratzinger letter,” because its principal author was the prefect of the Congregation for the Dotrine of the Faith (CDF), Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI). Sometimes people simply call it “the 1986 Letter.” The document is probably best known to LGBTQ+ Catholics as “the Halloween Letter” because, though it is officially dated October 1, 1986, the public only learned about it from news reports on Halloween, October 31, 1986.

Throughout the month of October, Bondings 2.0 will publish a series entitled “Forty Years of Wandering in the Desert.” It will feature six articles by Catholic theologians and thought leaders who advocate for LGBTQ+ people about the significance and impact of the Letter on church life and LGBTQ+ lives. The series title echoes the journey of the Hebrews as they searched for the Promised Land, and it is meant to reflect the struggle that Catholic LGBTQ+ people have experienced as a result of this document. Are we coming out of the desert yet?  The articles in this series will provide us some ways to best answer that question.

The negative impact the Letter had on LGBTQ+ ministry, advocacy, and lived reality cannot be overstated. It changed the entire church discourse on homosexuality for more than a generation, and it brought about major changes in church policy and practice. The document indicates that there was a need to counter a growing positive view of lesbian and gay people in the wake of  an earlier Vatican’s document which discussed homosexuality, the 1975 Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics.*  So, marking the 40th anniversary of  the Letter’s promulgation is a way to recall the positive era which preceded it, review the damage it has done, view the progress that was made in spite of it, and examine its lasting legacy in the Church.

Inaugurating this series today is James Alison, a gay Catholic Priest, theologian and author. He has been involved in theological and pastoral issues surrounding matters LGBT over the last forty years. He is currently resident in Madrid, Spain.

What Remains of “Homosexualitatis Problema” 40 Years Later?

by James Alison

James Alison

Homosexualitatis Problema (hereafter HP) claimed to be a pastoral document.¹ Yet in fact it introduced a new teaching (the claim that the homosexual tendency “must be seen as an objective disorder”) to buttress the traditional one (that same-sex acts are intrinsically wrong). The “must be seen” points to a logical necessity. After all, if same-sex acts do not flow from an objectively disordered tendency, that is to say a tendency ordered away from a sex act with a married partner of the opposite sex open to the possibility of procreation, then they might, at least occasionally, have an authentic and God-given, but non-procreative, finality.²

Because HP’s teaching was new it could only, by definition, be a third-order teaching, not something requiring the full assent of faith. Thus, when the (then) Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) required the late Fr. Bob Nugent³ to give his assent to it, it was in terms of what the church calls “obsequious obedience” proper to a third order teaching. The same thing was implied in (then Cardinal) Ratzinger’s reply to Sr Jeannine Gramick’s⁴ (then) superior’s concern that she might be excommunicated: “No, no, it’s not at that level at all.” Despite this, the new teaching was very quickly put into the Catechism, thereby giving the impression it was much more solid than it is, and making it difficult to remove without scandal.

Forty years on, my interest lies in asking how much both HP’s new teaching, and the pastoral restrictions which it sought to apply, are still in force. Not so much whether they are “obeyed” (for the most part, they aren’t), but whether the Roman Dicasteries still, in fact, hold to them. Let me give a couple of examples of what I mean. 

First, there is, as is well known, tension between the Vatican and the German bishops with relation to the German Synodal Process. In October 2023 the Vatican’s Secretariat of State wrote to the German Bishops concerning various synodal issues, the last and least of which were a few lines concerning “homosexual acts”:

1. b) Another issue, on which a particular local Church has absolutely no scope to hold a different view, concerns homosexual acts. For even if one acknowledges that, from a subjective point of view, there may be various factors that call upon us not to judge people, this in no way alters the assessment of the objective morality of these acts.

The Church’s constant teaching emphasises that ‘the objective moral assessment of sexual relations between persons of the same sex is clearly and firmly established. Another question, which is not under discussion here, is the degree of subjective moral culpability associated with such relations in each individual case.’

Please notice that there is no mention of the objectively disordered inclination, or any need to uphold it. And yet the teaching about acts is claimed to be “clearly and firmly established.” The lines above in quotation marks are not from a major teaching document, but from a notification concerning the writings of the distinguished Spanish Redemptorist theologian, Marciano Vidal. That is to say, from about as low authority a document as they could muster. So, the Secretariat of State assumes, and presumes that their German counterparts know, that the teaching about the objectively disordered tendency (a) is something on which a local Church does have scope to hold a different view; (b) that the teaching on acts stands independently of it (“clearly and firmly established”); and that therefore HP’s “must be considered” is not in fact necessary, and thus not true. If you claim that X is necessary in order to hold Y, and then later claim that Y stands without necessary reference to X, then you show that you don’t hold “X is necessary” to be binding.

A second example comes from an incident reported in Vida Nueva⁵ (Spain’s flagship Catholic weekly) in 2021. Apparently, a handful of Spain’s known culture-warrior bishops had been promoting a lay-run centre near Granada which offered to cure homosexuality. They regularly sent priests, deacons, seminarians and (allegedly) some of themselves there to “have their heterosexual side brought out.” They then sought permission from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy to have this centre accredited as the Church’s official centre for curing homosexuality. The Congregation took the request seriously enough to send an expert not only to investigate the Centre, but to interview many who had passed through it. The result was a letter so confidential that it was read out to the Spanish Bishops’ Conference at a closed meeting, with no written copy made available, and none posted to the Congregation’s site. On hearing the letter, the culture-warrior bishops apparently went up the wall like scalded cats, because not only was the Centre not approved, but Spain’s bishops were forbidden to send anyone there at all, and it was made clear that conversion therapy was absolutely disapproved. The Congregation even suggested that the bishops should not try to prevent any former patient from suing the place.

Since this incident, I have tried to get hold of the Congregation’s letter because I wanted to see the criteria which had been used by the investigator, and upheld by the Congregation, in yielding his judgment. Alas, I know no friendly leakers in the (now) Dicastery for the Clergy! However, when you put this together with the Courage ministry’s recent public insistence that it does not promote conversion therapy, while defending itself from a witness statement included in Study Group 9 Report, you might reasonably surmise that it is now forbidden to interpret the 1986 claim of the objectively disordered inclination as in any way authorizing conversion therapy. Further supporting this claim is the fact that Courage’s insistence was repeated by Bishop Munilla, the least shy and retiring of the Spanish culture warriors who had promoted the now-disavowed centre. Despite the fact that allowing for conversion therapy had been the semi-officially backed way of interpreting HP’s claim for decades.

This, frankly, leaves us in an interesting place: it has taken 40 years for HP to render itself moot. The public requirement now is to hold firm to the traditional teaching that the only acceptable sexual act is that between a married heterosexual couple open to procreation, which is where we were from Humanae Vitae (1968) up until 1986 when what changed was the way in which its logic was applied to gay people The only safe (because not psychologically damaging) interpretation of “must be considered objectively disordered” is that it is merely logically necessary to maintain the absolute prohibition against same-sex acts. 

And yes, it was logically necessary, because it was only by making gay and lesbian people judge their own sexual acts as if they were defective heterosexuals that the Church had any teaching about same-sex acts at all. Over the last forty years, however, that “stretch” has turned out to be completely implausible as it has become clear that gay and lesbian people “just are that way”, and that “that way” is not pathological. What was logically necessary has turned out to be unreasonable. In fact, it clashes with anthropological reality and has been shown (I won’t even begin to surmise at what human cost) to be untrue. And naturally, that puts the teaching it was supposed to defend into doubt as well.

What is interesting of course, is that we aren’t back to where we were between 1968 and 1986. The logically necessary way of holding the application of Humanae Vitae to gay people has failed in practice, and has been seen to fail, in such a way that increasing numbers of bishops absolutely do not accept that pastoral practice in this area must be limited to holding to the 1986 teaching. This is shown in the way that many dioceses refuse Courage’s attempts to be seen to be the only officially allowed pastoral group for LGBT people. And their relaxedness about allowing Fiducia Supplicans to be interpreted in a broad, rather than a restrictive sense (as it was by Cardinal Vesco in his preface to the recently published Homos et Cathos), is further proof of this teaching’s demise.. 

Finally, we can see that the Roman Dicasteries no longer hold to the 1986 document’s way of using Scripture against “homosexuality”–which was supporting the “clobber verses” in a strictly literal manner.This was already evident in the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s 1993 teaching against fundamentalism and was made more so in their more recent “Che cosa è l’uomo?” (What is man?), an explanation of biblical anthropology. In fact, there seems to be agreement among the “sanior pars”⁶ that the only way forward now is to learn who the people involved really are, and what is the appropriate shape of their flourishing for the life of the Church. A corner has been turned.

The failure of the 1986 teaching in practice means that the traditional prohibition reinforced by Humanae Vitae can only aprioristically, but not reasonably, be extended to apply to gay people, for whom it obliges us to treat ourselves as something which we are not. This means it can’t really apply to straight people either: for how can the unitive function of lovemaking be legitimately separable from the procreative function in the case of the minority, but only illegitimately so in the case of the majority? 

What I’ll be watching for over the next months and years are official ways of talking about heterosexual marriage and childbearing which celebrate and reaffirm both while quietly giving up on the claim that an aprioristically derived “objectivity” (a third century teaching about the marital act rendered ‘eternal’) must be applied to them. The fact that Pope Leo has indicated that he wants the temperature to go down on discussions of sexual ethics, and to go up on issues of justice and dignity suggests that this is where we’re headed.

Given all this, I consider the proposals of the Study Group 9 report to be the most interesting way that I know out of our quandaries, both straight and gay. Forty years after that dreadful Halloween⁷, which I remember so well, I’m honoured to have made it, through rough waters, to the beach with Jeannine Gramick, New Ways Ministry, and so many others. It’s sad that our brother Bob Nugent is no longer with us, but grateful for his witness (and personal kindness to me). It is becoming clear that at last the link between truthfulness and LGBT pastoral life can be lived publicly and wholeheartedly. And that just conceivably, the straight world will be happier for being a majority rather than bearing the terrible burden of “being normative.” 

–James Alison, October 1, 2026

Footnotes

* From Homosexualitatis Problema, section 3: “In the discussion which followed the publication of the Declaration, however, an overly benign interpretation was given to the homosexual condition itself, some going so far as to call it neutral, or even good.” For the references to homosexuality in the Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics, see section VIII.

 ¹ Its English title is Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons.

² I look at this in more depth in An open letter to my more conservative sisters and brothers, following the Synod Report of Group 9.

³ New Ways Ministry’s co-founder, Father Robert Nugent, SDS.

⁴ Another co-founder of New Ways Ministry.

⁵ Vida Nueva 2021 Número 3231.

⁶ Traditional language for the “non-crazies” in a religious community.

⁷ The day on which HP became known to the public.