(LifeSiteNews) — Seventeen American bishops have attended conferences held by New Ways Ministry (NWM), a dissident pro-LGBT group presenting itself as a Catholic organization that has been condemned by the Vatican.
The heterodox National Catholic Reporter (NCR) shared in a Wednesday article that “17bishops attended” programs on so-called “LGBTQ+” Catholics held by New Ways Ministry, with “many attending more than one conference.”
As LifeSiteNews has reported for many years, New Ways Ministry does not seek to help Catholics struggling with same-sex attraction or gender confusion live chaste, holy lives. Rather, it is striving to normalize the LGBT agenda in the Church by radically altering and even abolishing long-established Church teaching on the immorality of homosexual acts, transgenderism, sex-change surgeries, and a range of other sexual behaviors.
The conferences referenced by the NCR article reportedly covered “a variety of topics,” including “moral theology,” “psychological understandings of gender,” “and, perhaps most important, the positive and negative encounters that lesbian, gay, transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people have had with the institutional church.”
The last point, understood in light of NWM’s heretical understanding of homosexuality and gender, may reasonably be inferred to consider a church’s condemnation of homosexuality activity, per Catholic teaching, as a “negative encounter.”
The NCR article also indicated that the organization believes, contrary to Catholic teaching, that disordered sexual attraction is a core part of a person’s identity, and that priests and nuns in particular should be able to identify as “gay” or “lesbian.”
“Bishops listened with deep attention to personal stories from gay priests and lesbian nuns who shared how it felt to serve the church while receiving negative messages about their very being,” NCR wrote.
In fact, the Vatican has twice definitively declared a prohibition on ordaining homosexual men.
The first was the 1961 directive signed by Pope John XXIII that states, “Advancement to religious vows and ordination should be barred to those who are afflicted with evil tendencies to homosexuality or pederasty, since for them the common life and the priestly ministry would constitute serious dangers.” It also said that seminarians that “sinned gravely against the sixth commandment with a person of the same or opposite sex” were to be “dismissed immediately.”
The second was the 2005 Vatican instruction on the question of homosexuality and the priesthood that states, “The Church, while profoundly respecting the persons in question, cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called ‘gay culture.’”
While the NCR did not reveal the names of the 17 bishops who have attended New Ways Ministries’ LGBTQ+ conferences, a few have admitted to attending NWM meetings in the past.
Bishop John Stowe, OFM, of Lexington, Kentucky, is one of the most openly heterodox American clerics on the issue of homosexuality. In 2024, he was awarded NWM’s “Bridge Building Award” for his “LGBTQ+ efforts.”
Bishop John Dolan of Phoenix, Arizona, is also known to have attended a NWM summit, even after parishioners warned him about the organization’s LGBT agenda.
New Ways Ministry officially condemned
Founded in 1977 by pro-LGBT nun Jeannine Gramick, NWM was officially condemned by the Vatican in 1999.
Despite this, the group has enjoyed a sweeping rehabilitation under Francis, who has written letters of support and even met with Gramick along with her heterodox collaborators at the Vatican.
In 2010, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) declared that NWM “has no approval or recognition from the Catholic Church” to speak on the LGBT issue.
“No one should be misled by the claim that New Ways Ministry provides an authentic interpretation of Catholic teaching and an authentic Catholic pastoral practice,” wrote the late Cardinal Francis George, O.M.I., Archbishop of Chicago, on behalf of the USCCB.
“Their claim to be Catholic only confuses the faithful regarding the authentic teaching and ministry of the Church with respect to persons with a homosexual inclination,” George said. “Accordingly, I wish to make it clear that, like other groups that claim to be Catholic but deny central aspects of Church teaching, New Ways Ministry has no approval or recognition from the Catholic Church and that they cannot speak on behalf of the Catholic faithful in the United States.”
While same-sex attraction is not itself sinful, the Catholic Church unequivocally condemns homosexual acts.
“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. Under no circumstances can they be approved,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church states.
The Catechism is equally clear on what constitutes a family, stating, “A man and a woman united in marriage, together with their children, form a family. This institution is prior to any recognition by public authority, which has an obligation to recognize it.”