National Catholic Register portal (May 11, 2026) reports on Father Brian Gannon’s interview regarding the Synod on Synodality’s Study Group 9 report, which criticized Courage International — a canonically approved apostolate helping those with same-sex attractions live chastely. Father Gannon, the executive director, denounced the report as “intellectually dishonest,” noting that no Courage representative was consulted, that the group relied on witnesses who reject Church moral teaching, and that the report falsely claimed Courage practices “reparative therapy.” He further argued the report’s suggestion that same-sex relationships could be “a gift from God” contradicts 2,000 years of Catholic moral teaching. The article presents Father Gannon’s defense of the Church’s immutable teaching on chastity and his call for the hierarchy to reject the report as non-authoritative and incoherent with Catholic doctrine. Yet even this ostensibly orthodox defense operates within the compromised framework of the conciliar sect, where the very structures producing such reports remain unchallenged as instruments of apostasy.
The Architecture of Deception: How “Synodality” Manufactures Heresy Through Procedural Fraud
The interview with Father Brian Gannon, executive director of Courage International, exposes a mechanism that should be immediately recognizable to anyone who has studied the methods by which the post-conciliar apparatus systematically undermines Catholic truth: the deliberate exclusion of orthodox voices from processes whose conclusions are predetermined. Father Gannon states plainly: “Since no Courage representative was involved in the process, the study group became problematic and seems to contradict what synodality intends: the greater engagement of all relevant voices. It is thus intellectually dishonest.”
This is not a bug in the system — it is the system itself. The so-called “Synod on Synodality” is not a genuine consultation of the faithful, as the term synodus (Greek: σύνοδος, “journeying together”) might misleadingly suggest to the uninformed. It is a rigged procedure, designed to produce documents that incrementally normalize moral errors while maintaining a veneer of Catholic language. The exclusion of Courage International — a canonically approved universal association of the faithful with an episcopal board of bishops — from a study group purporting to examine the very issue on which Courage holds official competence, is not an oversight. It is a deliberate act of intellectual fraud, what the Romans called suppressio veri, suggestio falsi (suppression of the truth, suggestion of falsehood).
Pope Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), condemned the proposition that “the method and principles by which the old scholastic doctors cultivated theology are no longer suitable to the demands of our times and to the progress of the sciences” (Proposition 13). The Study Group 9 report embodies this condemned principle in its very methodology: the lived experience of those who dissent from Catholic moral teaching is elevated above the defined doctrine of the Church, while those who faithfully uphold that doctrine are excluded from the conversation. This is not synodality — it is the inversion of the Catholic order, where truth is prior to conscience and human experience, as Father Gannon himself correctly notes.
The Heresy Beneath the Language: Same-Sex Relationships as “Gift from God”
The most gravely dangerous element of the Study Group 9 report, as Father Gannon identifies, is the passage stating: “Within this struggle, yet simultaneously as a path toward its resolution, the account bears witness to the discovery that sin, at its root, does not consist in the (same-sex) couple relationship, but in a lack of faith in a God who desires our fulfilment.”
Let us dissect this statement with the precision it demands. The claim that sin “does not consist in the (same-sex) couple relationship” is a direct contradiction of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2357), which Father Gannon himself cites, and which draws upon the immutable teaching articulated in the Persona Humana declaration (1975) and, more fundamentally, upon the perennial teaching of Scripture and Tradition. The Catechism teaches: “Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity.”
The report’s claim that sin consists not in the act itself but in a “lack of faith” is nothing other than a repackaging of the condemned modernist proposition — anathematized in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) by St. Pius X — that “the dogmas of faith should be understood according to their practical function, i.e., as binding in action, rather than as principles of belief” (Proposition 26 of Lamentabili Sane Exitus). If sin is redefined as a subjective “lack of faith” rather than an objective violation of divine law, then the entire structure of Catholic moral theology collapses. This is precisely the error that St. Robert Bellarmine identified as the hallmark of heresy: the substitution of private judgment for the authoritative teaching of the Church.
Father Gannon correctly states: “The overall message seems to paint a same-sex relationship as a gift from God — completely in contradiction of 2,000 years of Catholic moral teaching.” Indeed. The teaching is unambiguous. In Genesis 18-19, the destruction of Sodom stands as divine judgment against homosexual acts. In Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, the Law explicitly condemns such acts as abominations. In Romans 1:26-27, St. Paul identifies homosexual acts as the consequence of idolatry, describing them as “against nature” (παρὰ φύσιν). In 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and 1 Timothy 1:10, those who practice such acts are excluded from the Kingdom of God. The Council of Elvira (c. 306), the Council of Ancyra (314), and the Third Lateran Council (1179) all imposed canonical penalties for homosexual acts. The teaching is not ambiguous. It is not subject to development. It is not open to “synodal” revision.
The False Framework: Operating Within the Conciliar Sect
And yet, precisely here we must subject Father Gannon’s own position to the rigorous critique that fidelity to Catholic truth demands. For while his defense of chastity is laudable in its content, his framework is fatally compromised. He speaks of the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” (1992) as though it were an unmixed document of Catholic truth. He invokes “Veritatis Splendor” — an encyclical of the usurper John Paul II — as though it carried the weight of authentic magisterial authority. He references “Pope Leo XIV” as though this individual occupied the Chair of Peter with legitimate authority. And he calls upon “the hierarchy” of the conciliar sect to correct the report — a hierarchy that has, for over six decades, systematically produced exactly such errors.
This is the fundamental problem. The “Catechism of the Catholic Church” promulgated under John Paul II, while containing much that is true, is a document of the conciliar church — a church that has, since the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958, progressively abandoned, obscured, or contradicted defined Catholic teaching on religious liberty, ecumenism, the nature of the Church, and the relationship between the Church and the modern world. The documents of Vatican II — Dignitatis Humanae, Nostra Aetate, Unitatis Redintegratio — represent a rupture with the perennial teaching of the Church, as articulated by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos (1832), by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), and by Pope Pius X in Pascendi (1907) and Lamentabili (1907).
Father Gannon asks: “How should the hierarchy effectively respond to this report?” and suggests they “assertively label it as it is: a non-authoritative summary of an incomplete inquiry.” But this presupposes that the hierarchy of the concilar sect possesses the authority or the will to correct such errors. It does not. The very “bishops” who sit on Courage International’s episcopal board are members of an ecclesiastical structure that has been, since 1958, progressively infiltrated by modernists, heretics, and apostates. The “bishops” who approved the Novus Ordo Missae — that Protestantized liturgical abomination that replaced the Traditional Latin Mass — are the same “bishops” who now produce synodal reports redefining sin. To appeal to this hierarchy for correction is to appeal to the arsonist to put out the fire.
The Deeper Apostasy: Why the Conciliar Sect Cannot Produce Truth
The Study Group 9 report does not emerge in a vacuum. It is the organic fruit of the conciliar revolution — a revolution that began with John XXIII’s aggiornamento and has continued through every subsequent pontificate of the usurpers. The “synodality” that Father Gannon criticizes for its procedural dishonesty is itself a product of the same spirit that produced Gaudium et Spes — the conciliar constitution that, for the first time in the history of the Church, spoke of the “joys and hopes” of the modern world as though they were compatible with the Gospel without the necessity of conversion.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), taught with clarity that the reign of Christ the King extends over all nations and all aspects of human life, and that “the State is happy not by one means, and man by another; for the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men.” He warned that “when God and Jesus Christ — as we lamented — were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” The synodal process, with its emphasis on “listening,” “accompaniment,” and “inclusion,” is precisely the mechanism by which the conciliar sect has removed Christ from the governance of the Church and replaced His authority with the spirit of the world.
The report’s claim that same-sex relationships can be “a gift from God” is not an isolated error. It is a symptom of the deeper disease identified by St. Pius X in Pascendi: the modernist principle that “the religious conscience must be placed on the same level as revelation itself, so that the latter may be adapted to the former.” When the “experience” of those in same-sex relationships is allowed to define the moral law, rather than the moral law judging that experience, the entire Catholic faith is inverted. This is what the Study Group 9 report accomplishes, and it is what the entire synodal process is designed to accomplish.
The Error of “Reparative Therapy” Accusations
Father Gannon is correct to note that the report’s claim that Courage practices “reparative therapy” is false. He states: “Courage does not engage in reparative therapy; this is utterly false. Chastity, personal accompaniment and grace through the sacraments are key to Courage’s ministry.” This is an important clarification, because the accusation of “reparative therapy” has been a standard weapon used by the sexual revolution both within and outside the Church to discredit any ministry that upholds the sinfulness of homosexual acts.
However, we must note that the conciliar sect’s sacraments themselves are gravely suspect. The Novus Ordo Missae, promulgated by the apostate Paul VI in 1969, is a rite that the Catholic theologian Guérard des Lauriers demonstrated to be theologically ambiguous with regard to the propitiatory sacrifice of the Mass. The new rite of ordination, also promulgated by Paul VI, has been judged by competent theologians to be invalid. If the “sacraments” to which Father Gannon refers are the sacraments of the Novus Ordo, then their efficacy is at best doubtful and at worst null. The “grace through the sacraments” that Courage offers is, in the present ecclesiastical situation, a grace mediated through rites whose validity is gravely suspect.
This is not a peripheral concern. The entire Catholic faith rests on the efficacy of the sacraments. If the sacraments of the conciliar sect are invalid — as the evidence strongly suggests — then Courage International, however orthodox its stated teaching, is offering spiritual sustenance from an empty vessel. The Traditional Latin Mass, celebrated by priests validly ordained according to the pre-conciliar rites, remains the sole guarantee of valid sacramental life in the present crisis of the Church.
The Call to Immutable Tradition, Not Conciliar Reform
Father Gannon concludes by calling on the hierarchy to affirm that “the teaching of the Church is clear: God is infinite Love and unchanging Truth. Truth is prior to conscience and human experience; thus, the immutable moral teachings of the Church that any sexual actions outside of proper marriage are always sinful.” This is correct. But the question is: which Church? Which hierarchy? Which teaching?
The Church that teaches with immutable authority is the Catholic Church as She existed before the conciliar revolution — the Church of Pope Pius IX, who declared in Qui Pluribus (1846) that “the Church is a true and perfect society, entirely free, endowed with proper and perpetual rights of her own, conferred upon her by her Divine Founder.” It is the Church of Pope Leo XIII, who taught in Immortale Dei (1885) that “the Almighty, therefore, has given the charge of the human race to two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human, each the highest in its own kind, each fixed within certain limits, and its own nature and special character defined.” It is the Church of Pope St. Pius X, who condemned modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies.”
The conciliar sect — the structures occupying the Vatican since 1958 — is not this Church. It is a counterfeit institution that uses the language of Catholicism while systematically dismantling its content. The “bishops” who govern it are, by the very fact of their manifest heresy, deprived of all jurisdiction, as St. Robert Bellarmine taught: “The fifth true opinion is that a Pope who is a manifest heretic, by that very fact ceases to be Pope and head, just as he ceases to be a Christian and member of the body of the Church.” The same principle applies to “bishops” who embrace and propagate the errors of Vatican II.
The Study Group 9 report is not an aberration. It is the logical, inevitable product of a system built on the rejection of Catholic truth. Father Gannon’s defense of chastity is commendable, but his appeal to the conciliar hierarchy for correction is futile. The only authentic response to the apostasy is the complete rejection of the conciliar structures and a return to the immutable Tradition of the Catholic Church — the Church of all ages, which has never and can never teach that sin is a “gift from God” or that the moral law is subject to revision by “synodal” processes.
As Pope Pius IX declared in the Syllabus of Errors: “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” — this proposition, numbered 80, was condemned. The synodal process is precisely this condemned reconciliation with modernity. It must be rejected entirely, not reformed from within. The faithful must seek the true sacraments, the true Mass, and the true teaching of the Catholic Church, which endures in the remnant who profess the integral Catholic faith, outside and against the structures of the conciliar sect.
Source:
Courage Director: Synod Report ‘Wounds the Church’ (ncregister.com)
Date: 11.05.2026