Bishop Athanasius Schneider has launched a forceful critique of the Vatican’s new report on “emerging doctrinal, pastoral and ethical issues,” saying its treatment of homosexuality advances an “exegesis of doubt” in divine revelation that echoes the serpent in the Garden of Eden and opens the door to “total moral relativism.”
The 30-page final report, published on May 5 by the Holy See’s General Secretariat of the Synod, was prepared by Study Group No. 9, one of ten study groups established by Pope Francis in February 2024 to examine issues that emerged during the first session of the Synod on Synodality in October 2023.
The seven-member study group included Cardinal Carlos Castillo Mattasoglio, Archbishop of Lima, Peru; Archbishop Filippo Iannone, Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops; and Italian moral theologian Father Maurizio Chiodi, a professor at the Pontifical John Paul II Theological Institute for the Sciences of Marriage and the Family who has openly argued that sexual acts within a homosexual relationship can be good in certain circumstances. Fr. Chiodi is believed to have been its main author.
The report quickly drew criticism from Catholic commentators but was immediately praised as a “major step forward” by “LGBTQ+” advocates such as Father James Martin, SJ.
Controversy intensified after it emerged that one of the two testimonies featured in the report was authored by the man pictured on the front page of the New York Times in 2023 receiving a blessing with his same-sex partner from the same Jesuit priest, just one day after the publication of Fiducia Supplicans.
In this interview, Bishop Schneider discusses what he views as an unholy alliance between the Synod Secretariat and proponents of an “anti-Christian” ideology, the extent to which the Study Group No. 9 final report represents a “red line,” and how its publication might affect already tense relations between the Vatican and the traditionalist priestly Society of St. Pius X.
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