'Witch hunt’: New Ways Ministry attacks Ratzinger’s 1986 letter on homosexuality

A pro-LGBT organization condemned by the Church has launched a month-long campaign against Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s landmark 1986 document on “the pastoral care of homosexual people,” demanding the complete repeal of Catholic moral teaching regarding homosexual acts on the 40th anniversary of the letter’s release.

Throughout the month of October, the dissident American group New Ways Ministry published a six-part essay series entitled “Forty Years of Wandering in the Desert,” designed to attack the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s October 1, 1986, letter “The Problem of Homosexuality.”

Marking the 40th anniversary of the letter – derisively dubbed by pro-LGBT activists as the “Halloween Letter” (after secular news outlets reported on it on October 31, 1986) – New Ways Ministry gathered the writings of heterodox theologians, priests, and activists who claim that Catholic moral teaching caused “tremendous stress, trauma, and grief” among homosexuals; “formalized homophobia as church policy”; and has now been rendered “moot” by the synodal agenda of Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV.

“Until the harmful, discriminatory teachings in this Letter and the Catechism of our church are repealed, we cannot have equality and full dignity in our church,” Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA, stated in a post published October 13.

The coordinated anniversary campaign by New Ways Ministry brought together prominent progressive Catholic figures to mount an assault on foundational Catholic sexual ethics and Thomistic anthropology. The contributors accused Ratzinger’s letter of building a defensive “fortress mentality” against the sexual revolution.

In his concluding essay on October 31, New Ways Ministry Executive Director Francis DeBernardo compared Ratzinger’s warnings against clerical infiltration to a “witch hunt,” alleging that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith unjustly characterized gay advocacy groups as an invading “fifth column” seeking to subvert Catholic morality. DeBernardo celebrated that this orthodox vigilance “began to melt in 2013 when Francis became pope,” arguing that while Francis never explicitly revoked Ratzinger’s letter, he worked to make it “obsolete.”

Other contributors used the anniversary to call directly for the rewriting of Sacred Scripture and Catholic dogma.

On October 1, the “gay priest” and dissident writer Father James Alison claimed that the Bible’s explicit prohibitions against sodomy can no longer be interpreted literally by Roman dicasteries, citing the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s recent publications to argue that Catholic doctrine “turned a corner” toward blessing same-sex “unions” under Fiducia Supplicans and the final document submitted by the Synod on Synodality’s Study Group 9.

On October 7, theologian Jason Steidl Jack complained that Ratzinger’s letter “formalized homophobia as church policy” and lamented that young Catholic priests today are “more traditionalist” and resistant to homosexual ideology than “older, more progressive priests,” thus threatening pro-LGBT parish programs.

On October 21, Jesuit priest Father Lucas Sharma even attacked the philosophical and anthropological roots of St. Thomas Aquinas in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, arguing that the term “intrinsically disordered” has become a “refrain of shame” for Catholics who identify as LGBT and cited the teaching as “one of the chief reasons people leave Catholicism today.” On October 27, feminist theologian Annie Selak declared the Church a “wounder” and “perpetrator” whose official hierarchy must be displaced by the lived experiences of LGBT activists.

Throughout the series, the contributors made no secret of their ultimate goal: weaponizing the ongoing synodal process to force the Vatican to renounce Ratzinger’s document, dismantle the Catechism, and formally approve same-sex sexual unions. At the same time, the authors argue that there is no homosexual lobby within the Church and that there are no grounds for believing that an organized, infiltrated group exists with the aim of subverting Catholic moral teaching.

On October 1, 1986, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, with the explicit approval of Pope John Paul II, issued the “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons.” The document defines the homosexual inclination as an objective disorder tending toward intrinsic moral evil and strictly commands bishops to withdraw all support and church facilities from organizations that undermine Church teaching on the matter.

Ratzinger’s Letter is rooted in the perennial biblical theology of creation, reaffirming that God established the human person as male and female in a complementary, life-giving marital covenant. It claims that any deliberate misuse of the sexual faculty outside holy matrimony is intrinsically disordered and contrary to God’s divine wisdom.

Crucially, Ratzinger dismantled the secular premise that reduces human persons to mere sexual labels like “heterosexual” or “homosexual.” He insisted instead on the transcendent dignity of every soul as a child of God called to eternal beatitude. Against the sentimental deception that equates pastoral care with condoning sin, the letter stated that “only what is true can ultimately be pastoral,” warning that departing from Church teaching or remaining silent out of human respect deprives souls of authentic care and conversion.

In warning against the “studied ambiguity” and subversive tactics of LGBT pressure groups seeking to manipulate pastors and subvert Catholic morality, the 1986 letter of the CDF provided an enduring defense of the sanctity of the family, the salvation of souls, and the unchanging law of God.

In the 2016 book-length interview “Last Conversations,” released by Pope Benedict XVI to the German journalist Peter Seewald, the former pope clarified that the existence of a “gay lobby” and the presence of a pro-LGBT “inner circle” in the Vatican had been formally confirmed to him in the final report prepared by the three-cardinal commission of inquiry established in the aftermath of the Vatileaks scandal.

Benedict also claimed that “the Vatican is certainly not teeming with such cases,” and that such a lobby was said to consist of “a small group of four, perhaps five people,” and which had been completely “disbanded.”

Since the election of Pope Francis, however, the influence and reach of this lobby appeared far more extensive. According to a 2019 investigative book by the French pro-LGBT journalist and sociologist Frédéric Martel, titled “In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy,” homosexuality is widespread within the Catholic clergy and Vatican circles. The book exposed a system of “double lives,” drawing on interviews with cardinals, bishops, priests, and other sources.