Recently two Catholic apostolates to homosexuals both held important conferences promoting their respective organizations. Their starkly differing approaches raise the question of the proper relationship between the truth of doctrine and the mercy we need to show in our pastoral application of those truths. 

The first organization is the well-established ministry known as Courage International, founded in 1980 by Father John Harvey (1918-2010), which met July 25-28 at Mundelein Seminary near Chicago. The second is Outreach, the relatively new ministry of Jesuit Father James Martin, which held a conference Aug. 2-4 at Georgetown University. 

Those unfamiliar with either of these ministries may wonder why the Church in America needs two national organizations devoted to the same cause. The short answer is that they offer a contrast — often sharp in its differences — in pastoral approaches.

Courage emphasizes the truth of the Catholic Church’s teaching on human sexuality and of the Church’s theological anthropology in general. It therefore has always been a haven for those same-sex attracted Catholics who are seeking to live chaste lives in accord with the Church’s teachings. 

Outreach, by contrast, does not emphasize the truth of the Church’s teachings and prefers instead a “come as you are” message of latitudinarian tolerance. Therefore, it tends to attract people who, at best, struggle with the Church’s teachings or, at worst, reject it outright and seek its change. 

During my years as a professor at DeSales University, I had the privilege on many occasions of talking to the founder of Courage, Father Harvey, a priest of the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales who lived on campus. I would often ask him for guidance on how to approach, in my theology classes, those students who openly identified as homosexual. His response was always unequivocal: “Be kind. Be gradual and compassionate. But always remember that the Church’s teachings are true and are therefore, in the end, the greatest compassion of all.”

This, it seems to me, is the nub of the issue as we debate which pastoral approach in the arena of moral theology is best. The effort of pastoring Catholics in difficult circumstances requires prudence and wisdom. It is as much spiritual art as it is exact science. Sometimes, as Pope St. John Paul II noted in Familiaris Consortio, what is required is the application of the “law of gradualism” where a sinner is slowly brought to the truth through a sometimes long process of discernment. However, to dispel any misunderstanding in a hyper-subjectivist direction, Pope John Paul quickly adds:

“They cannot however look on the law as merely an ideal to be achieved in the future: they must consider it as a command of Christ the Lord to overcome difficulties with constancy. And so what is known as ‘the law of gradualness’ or step-by-step advance cannot be identified with ‘gradualness of the law,’ as if there were different degrees or forms of precept in God’s law for different individuals and situations” (34).

This is so, he says, because the moral order is not a list of “mere rules” imposed by authority and having little bearing on “real people” in the “real circumstances” of their lives. He further states:

“Since the moral order reveals and sets forth the plan of God the Creator, for this very reason it cannot be something that harms man, something impersonal. On the contrary, by responding to the deepest demands of the human being created by God, it places itself at the service of that person's full humanity with the delicate and binding love whereby God Himself inspires, sustains and guides every creature towards its happiness” (34).

This is precisely what Father Harvey meant when he reiterated that the Church’s moral teachings are true and therefore are the “greatest form of compassion.” In other words, truth is the most pastoral reality of all, and any ministry to Catholics in “difficult circumstances” that never gets around to articulating these truths is guilty of spiritual malpractice and has simply fallen prey to a form of false kindness, rooted in sentimentalism and a largely therapeutic view of life, that undermines the truth of the moral order.

As C.S. Lewis points out in The Problem of Pain, this kind of false kindness — false because it is not oriented to the moral good — is actually a veiled form of contempt. It is an admission that you do not think a person is worth the effort to bring to the truth, and so you leave him where he is, with some small palliative to make his day easier. 

While it is true that people must be taught to walk before they can run, there is also the sad fact that there are currently many in the Church who simply do not believe that the Church’s teachings are true, and therefore view them as an impediment to a Church of “welcoming inclusion.” 

We see this in the contrast between Courage and Outreach. Father Martin is always very careful never to explicitly deny any Church teaching. He has stated many times that he does not “reject” any moral teaching of the Church. 

Nevertheless, his many statements of loyalty to Church teaching seem more geared toward the laudable ideal of ecclesial obedience rather than a real embracing of the truth of those teachings. When one goes to the Outreach webpage and reads many of the linked essays, and when one looks at the list of speakers and topics at the recent Georgetown conference, there is no way to avoid the conclusion that Outreach is the opposite of Courage in terms of truly and fully believing that the Church’s teachings are true and therefore the fullest form of compassion. 

Outreach can claim that it’s applying the law of pastoral gradualism, and that there is no need to repeat Church teaching on these matters since everyone already knows what it is and it “has not been received.” But if that were true then it would be all the more reason to help these Catholics to see the truth of the teaching and “receive” it as such. 

Instead, one gets a steady stream of essays and talks geared to showing that the Bible does not condemn homosexual acts, that the Church’s teaching is not up to date with the latest findings of science, and that the Church has changed its moral teachings before (e.g., death penalty, religious freedom) so the teaching against homosexuality may change one day, too. 

This is a not-so-subtle pitting of doctrine against mercy, with the doctrine portrayed as onerous and grounded in pre-modern prejudices and unscientific Aristotelian/Thomistic concepts of natural law. What one sees argued for repeatedly by Outreach authors is a view of the primacy of conscience in moral matters that is hyper-individualistic, subjectivist in a flawed therapeutic sense, and having only an extrinsic connection to the teaching of the Church that is often portrayed as something standing over and against the individual conscience. Furthermore, scriptural verses that state that homosexual acts are immoral are merely dismissed as “clobber texts” that can now be safely ignored. And what goes largely unnoticed is that when one begins by pitting “mercy” against “truth” on a pastoral level in the name of “accompaniment,” it is not long before the truth itself comes to be redefined to be more in line with the values of the sexual revolution. 

At the Georgetown conference, it was revealed that Pope Francis had sent a warm letter of support to those gathered, and one of the Masses was presided over by Cardinal Wilton Gregory of Washington, who praised the conference as a wonderful exercise in synodal listening.

By contrast, there was no such warm papal letter of support sent to the Courage meeting in July. Nor did the local ordinary, Cardinal Blase Cupich, attend and preside at Mass. He was otherwise busy and had communicated his regrets.

Furthermore, none of the leaders of Courage were made voting members of the Synod on Synodality as Father Martin was. Nor have any of them been given jobs in the Vatican and multiple photo ops with the Pope as Father Martin has. Nor, as far as I know, have the leaders of Courage been given private letters of support such as the ones sent by Pope Francis to Sister Jeannine Gramick, who runs the dissenting New Ways Ministry. 

Therefore, it seems that the pitting of doctrine against mercy as a pastoral approach to homosexual Catholics is seemingly more favored in Rome these days than the more traditional approach of Courage where doctrine is embraced as true and therefore pastorally liberating. It is simply hard to avoid this conclusion given the preponderance of the evidence. 

What’s at stake is not only the pastoral importance of truth — it’s whether or not the Church’s moral teachings regarding homosexuality are true at all. One prays that the Holy Father be strengthened in communicating this truth, so that he may turn and strengthen his brethren in these matters.