The National Catholic Register portal reports on a commentary by Ann Schneible, former communications director for Courage International, regarding a 2024 Synod on Synodality working group report that criticized the apostolate and mischaracterized its mission. The article describes Courage’s work with same-sex-attracted individuals, recounts personal anecdotes from conferences, and decries the synod report’s claims that Courage promotes “reparative therapy” and that its membership is “problematic.” Schneible expresses disappointment but claims reassurance from “Pope” Leo XIV’s February 2026 meeting with the apostolate. This article, while ostensibly defending Courage, unwittingly exposes the fundamental incompatibility of the entire conciliar structure — including its approved apostolates — with the immutable Catholic doctrine on chastity, the supernatural life, and the true nature of the Church.
The Synod’s Heresy: Normalizing Sodomy Under the Guise of “Listening”
The Synod Study Group 9 report’s description of same-sex “marriages” as a standard toward which the Church should conform her moral teaching is not a mere pastoral misstep — it is formal heresy. The Catholic Church has always and everywhere taught that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and “contrary to the natural law,” as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith stated in its 1986 letter Homosexualitatis Problema — itself a document of the conciliar sect, yet one that at least retained the vocabulary of Catholic moral theology. To frame same-sex unions as anything other than a grave sin against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments is to deny the divine law itself.
Pius XI, in the encyclical Quas Primas (1925), proclaimed that Christ’s kingdom “encompasses all men” and that “there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). The reign of Christ the King admits no exception for sexual immorality. The Apostle Paul’s teaching is unambiguous: “Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor liars with mankind… shall possess the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:9-10). The synod report, by treating soditically active relationships as a legitimate pastoral reality to be accommodated rather than a mortal sin to be repented of, commits the very error condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu (1907): the proposition that “the Church is incapable of effectively defending evangelical ethics, because it steadfastly adheres to its views, which cannot be reconciled with modern progress” (Proposition 63).
The synod’s methodology — listening to the testimony of men in same-sex “marriages” and treating their experience as a source of doctrinal development — embodies the modernist heresy of the “evolution of dogmas,” condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907). Dogmas do not evolve. Truth does not change with man, as the Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX explicitly condemned in Proposition 58. The synod’s entire framework is built on the modernist premise that human experience, rather than divine revelation, is the measure of truth.
Courage International: A Neo-Church Apostolate in a Structure of Apostasy
Ann Schneible’s defense of Courage International, while expressed with apparent sincerity, reveals the tragic contradiction at the heart of operating within the conciliar sect. Courage exists as a canonically approved apostolate of the post-conciliar structure. It operates under the authority of “bishops” appointed by the usurpers in Rome. It receives chaplains assigned by these same “bishops.” Its very canonical legitimacy derives from the authority of a structure that, by its embrace of religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), false ecumenism, and the novel concept of “synodality,” has departed from the Catholic faith.
The article states that “it is the bishop, not the headquarters, that decides to open a chapter.” This is precisely the problem. The “bishops” of the conciliar sect are themselves, in the vast majority of cases, manifest heretics and apostates. As St. Robert Bellarmine taught in De Romano Pontifice (II, 30), 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.” If the principle applies to the sovereign pontiff — and Bellarmine, Wernz and Vidal, John of St. Thomas, and Pope Celestine I’s own practice regarding Nestorius all confirm that it does — then it applies with equal force to bishops who profess heresy. A “bishop” who embraces the synod’s accommodation of sodomy lacks jurisdiction. His approval of Courage is spiritually void. Courage’s canonical legitimacy within the concilar structure is no legitimacy at all — it is an authorization from a body that has, in the words of Canon 188.4 of the 1917 Code of Canon Law, “publicly defected from the Catholic faith.”
The Absence of the Supernatural: What Courage Cannot Say
The most damning aspect of Schneible’s article is not what it says, but what it omits. The entire commentary operates within a naturalistic framework. The language used — “freedom,” “catharsis,” “tears and laughter,” “wisdom,” “navigating complexities” — is the language of secular psychology and self-help, not of Catholic asceticism and the supernatural life of grace.
Nowhere in the article is there any mention of the state of grace, mortal sin, confession, penance, or the particular judgment. The “freedom” described is not the freedom of the children of God (Rom. 8:21), but a therapeutic freedom — the freedom to “be oneself” within a framework that never demands the total renunciation of sin. The “elderly gentleman, after the passing of his same-sex partner of many years, is faithfully committed to Courage’s mission” — but was he ever called to repent of that soditically active relationship? Was he told that persistence in such a state, without contrition and confession, means eternal damnation? The article is silent.
Pius XI declared in Quas Primas that Christ’s kingdom “requires its followers not only to renounce earthly riches and possessions… but also to deny themselves and carry their cross.” The Courage described in this article offers community, understanding, and emotional support — but where is the cross? Where is the call to mortification, to fasting, to the severe discipline that the Church has always taught is necessary for the purification of the passions? The “enviable reverence” of the former male model is praised, but reverence at prayer is not the same as sanctifying grace. Judas too was present at the Last Supper.
The article’s description of the single life as “devastatingly difficult” and its implicit framing of chastely living with same-sex attraction as a cross to be sympathized with rather than a vocation to be embraced in the spirit of evangelical perfection reveals a fundamentally naturalistic anthropology. Catholic teaching holds that every baptized person is called to holiness — to sanctifying grace, to the theological virtues, to the mortification of the flesh. The Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that “the grace of God is necessary to salvation, and that without it we can do nothing.” The entire Courage framework, as presented here, operates on the assumption that the primary problem is emotional suffering, not the state of the soul before God.
The “Conversion Therapy” Smear and the Conciliar Sect’s Double Game
Schneible correctly notes that Courage “does not provide, refer for, or require any form of therapy for its members.” This is precisely the problem from the perspective of integral Catholic faith. The Church has always taught that homosexual acts are gravely sinful and that those who suffer from same-sex attraction are called to chastity — which means, concretely, the total abstention from homosexual acts and the mortification of disordered desires. If Courage does not actively guide its members toward the elimination of same-sex attraction through prayer, sacramental grace, and spiritual direction — if it merely offers “support” for living chastely without addressing the root of the disorder — then it is offering a palliative, not a cure.
The synod report’s conflation of Courage with “conversion therapy” is indeed a smear, but it is a smear that the concilar sect deploys precisely because it has already abandoned the Catholic understanding of homosexuality. The post-conciliar “Church” does not want homosexuals to be cured; it wants them to be affirmed. The synod report’s true purpose is not pastoral care but the progressive normalization of sodomy within the structures of the neo-church. Courage, by maintaining even a nominal commitment to chastity, is an obstacle to this project — and the synod report seeks to marginalize it.
The legal efforts to ban “conversion therapy” — which increasingly define the term to include “any effort to change behaviors” — are the logical consequence of the conciliar revolution. When the Church abandoned her teaching on the intrinsic disorder of homosexual acts, she created the conditions for the secular state to criminalize the very concept of conversion. The conciliar sect sowed the wind; the secular world reaps the whirlwind.
“Pope” Leo XIV’s Meeting: The Kiss of Judas
Schneible expresses reassurance that “Pope” Leo XIV met with Courage in February 2026, interpreting this as a sign of his appreciation for the apostolate’s mission. This is the most tragic element of the entire article. The meeting of a usurper antipope with a neo-church apostolate is not a sign of health — it is a sign of the total integration of the apostolate into the structures of the abomination of desolation.
Robert Prevost — “Leo XIV” — is not the successor of Peter. He occupies the Vatican as part of a line of usurpers beginning with John XXIII, each of whom has advanced the modernist revolution. His meeting with Courage is not a Catholic act; it is the conciar sect’s mechanism of control, ensuring that even those apostolates that retain some vestige of Catholic moral language remain firmly within the orbit of a structure that has rejected the faith. The meeting is the kiss of Judas — a gesture of apparent friendship that conceals betrayal.
The true Church — the Church of all ages, the Church that confesses one baptism for the remission of sins and looks for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come — has no “headquarters” in Trumbull, Connecticut, no “chaplains” assigned by heretical “bishops,” and no meetings with antipopes. She has the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, validly offered by priests ordained according to the traditional rite, the sacraments as Christ instituted them, and the unchanging moral law of God. The men and women who experience same-sex attraction and who seek to live chastely deserve the fullness of Catholic pastoral care — not the watered-down, naturalistic, psychologized substitute offered by an apostolate of the conciliar sect.
The Tragedy of Good Intentions Within a Bad Structure
The individuals described in Schneible’s article — the man who left the porn industry, the parents grieving estranged children, the elderly widower — are real people with real suffering. Their pain is genuine, and their desire to live in accordance with what they believe to be God’s will is commendable on the natural level. But good intentions do not sanctify a corrupt structure. The Israelites who worshipped the golden calf did so with sincerity; their sincerity did not make their worship legitimate.
The entire framework of this article — the synod, the apostolate, the “pope,” the “bishops” — is the framework of the conciliar revolution, which is itself the culmination of the modernist heresy that St. Pius X identified as “the synthesis of all errors.” The synod report’s hostility to Courage is not an anomaly; it is the logical fruit of a structure that has progressively abandoned Catholic doctrine. Courage’s continued existence within that structure, and its continued deference to the authority of usurpers and heretics, makes it complicit — however unwittingly — in the destruction of the faith it claims to serve.
The words of Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (Proposition 80) ring with prophetic clarity: “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” — this is the very program of the concilar sect, and every synod, every apostolate, and every “pope” within it serves this program. The only response worthy of a Catholic is the one that the Syllabus demands: the absolute rejection of the reconciliation of the Church with the world, and the uncompromising confession that Jesus Christ is King — of individuals, of families, of nations, and of every aspect of human life, including and especially human sexuality.
Source:
Courage, The Apostolate That I Know Well (ncregister.com)
Date: 21.05.2026