How Religion Is Reframing the LGBTQ Movement

How Religion Is Reframing the LGBTQ Movement January 16, 2025

A Pride Rainbow Flag hangs outside of a church.
A Pride Rainbow Flag hangs outside of a Catholic church. Photo by Ricky Esquivel of Wikimedia Commons.

By Timothy Villareal

The LGBTQ acronym is a philosophical antique.  Cunning religious opponents of homosexuality have repurposed the social identity marker for their own anti-homosexuality ends, and some LGBTQ activists are all too happy to oblige. 

Last October, the Catholic LGBTQ support organization founded by the Jesuit priest, James Martin, held a conference in Rome to coincide with the Vatican’s Synod on Synodality.  Martin and his organization, Outreach, want LGBTQ Catholics the world over to know they are the go-to resource for “help and support” to navigate “being Catholic and LGBTQ.”  As confirmed by the National Catholic Reporter, one woman attendee at Martin’s Rome conference wanted to tell the gathered synod delegates in Rome that “the message of Jesus was one of love and urged church leaders to see LGBTQ Catholics as human beings rather than the summation of their sins.”

For the last several years James Martin has been traveling the country and globe preaching his message of LGBTQ inclusion, never missing an opportunity to dot his social media and videos with rainbow imagery.  Last year, he traveled to Ireland.  While Martin chose not divulge the content of his secret conversations with the Irish bishops when he met with them at Ireland’s Knock Shrine to discuss the Vatican document authorizing “blessings” for same-sex couples, we can fairly presume the message from the LGBTQ advocate priest to the Irish bishops was in the same vein as his Outreach organization’s Rome conference: welcome LGBTQ Catholics, despite their sexual “sins.”

Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin: A Tactical Rebranding?

In other words, “love the sinner, hate the sin,” but just get more clever, more Machiavellian, in going about ending their homosexual relations.  In fact, Martin himself noted in a recent blog post that he supports the Catholic Church’s teaching that homosexual acts are a sin.  His LGBTQ conference attendee’s reference to her own homosexuality as a “sin” falls right in line with Martin’s own religious beliefs.

For those who may have forgotten, let’s remember, the gay rights movement was a sexual liberation movement, period.  The purpose of the movement was to unshackle the manifold legal and psychological constraints that prohibited people from pursuing same-sex relationships between consenting adults.  In 2025, it is now undeniable that the LGBTQ acronym and its attendant rainbow symbology are no longer synonymous with sexual liberation and the goodness that ethical sexual liberation brings to people’s lives, but just the opposite.

As far as homosexuality itself is concerned, the acronym is now a value-neutral umbrella term that gives equal moral weight and, indeed, communal standing to those individuals, be they same-sex attracted or not, who are either deeply opposed to homosexuality or are still, well into adulthood, ambivalent as to the morality of homosexuality.

Pope Francis’ Same-Sex Blessings: A Step Forward or a Trap?

Most notably, last year the “LGBTQ ally” known as Pope Francis received high praise from LGBTQ advocates and media outlets the world over for that decree permitting Catholic priests to give blessings to same-sex couples.  And yet, after ten years of strategic ambiguity on the subject of homosexuality, the endgame of Pope Francis and the Vatican authors of this new same-sex blessing document was made plain in the Vatican’s Dec. 18 2023 decree, “Fiducia Supplicans,” which read:

A blessing may be imparted that not only has an ascending value but also involves the invocation of a blessing that descends from God upon those who — recognizing themselves to be destitute and in need of his help — do not claim a legitimation of their own status, but who beg that all that is true, good, and humanly valid in their lives and their relationships be enriched, healed, and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit.
This means that the Catholic Church would like to see same-sex couples continue to care for one another as human beings, but nevertheless ditch the sexual intimacy that exists between them. The “LGBTQ affirming” priest who is giving a same-sex couple a blessing, per Pope Francis’ decree, is engaged in a religious exercise to affirm the mutual caring that exists between the couple, but also a religious exercise to aim for the “healing” of the “sinful” sexual component of their relationship.
After so many grossly misleading headlines and opinion editorials all over the Western world, this express religious intention had to be restated by the author of “Fiducia Supplicans,” Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez. In an interview with the Catholic outlet The Pillar, Fernandez said of the same-sex couple blessings, “since it is not a question of the sacrament of confession, but of a simple blessing, it is still asked that this friendship be purified, matured and lived in fidelity to the Gospel.  And even if there was some kind of sexual relationship, known or not, the blessing made this way does not validate or justify anything.”

The Catholic Church’s Endgame: Healing or Erasure?

Here, Fernandez could not be more clear: homosexuality, according to the Catholic church, is both impure and sexually immature; the priestly blessings are specifically intended to “purify” and “mature” the same-sex couple from their “degenerate” sexual activity.
Fr. Greg Greiten performs the area’s first advertised LGBTQ+ Catholic Mass of Inclusion. Still Great in America, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Again, reiterating that same-sex couples who share sexual intimacy between themselves are not admitted to the Catholic sacraments unless they have confessed their (in the Catholic church’s view) sexual sins, Fernandez told the Spanish media outlet ABC that the approval of a blessing is not “accepting a marriage, nor is it a ratification of the life they lead, nor is it an absolution. It is a simple gesture of pastoral closeness that does not have the same requirements of the sacrament.”

Let’s repeat the key part: “nor is it an absolution.”
Here, Fernandez is alluding to the already existing status of same-sex couples in the Catholic Church: namely, so long as they continue to have sexual relations, they cannot receive holy Eucharist.  To do so, they must be absolved of their “sins” by going to confession, and commit to “sin” no more.  Until then, a fifteen-second blessing, intended to spiritually spur the two individuals back into the sacramental order by realizing the “sinfulness” of their sexual relationship is what Catholic priests are now permitted to offer.
That any self-respecting same-sex couple would seek out the blessing of a religious figure, in this case, a Catholic priest, who believes that their sexual intimacy is an offense to God says more about the ever-increasing philosophical absurdities of the LGBTQ acronym than it does about the Catholic Church.
What was once a movement that was synonymous with sexual liberation has now, thanks to a vapid and easily manipulated acronym, become a Trojan horse for homosexuality rejecters to psychologically weave themselves into the heads of homosexual persons with the express aim of ending their sexual relations.
Indeed, the fact is on the issue of the morality of homosexuality, the Catholic Church has not changed one bit: the Church considers homosexuality a sin that separates a soul from God.
Quite conversely, on the issue of homosexuality, the acronym “LGBTQ” has indeed changed, and radically so. It is no longer an acronym synonymous with defending the human homoerotic capacity when responsibly expressed between consenting adults, but rather an acronym that is being utilized by avowed religious opponents of homosexuality, like Pope Francis and the Jesuit priest James Martin, in their mission to stamp out the homoerotic capacity from the human condition.

What the Vatican’s ‘Fiducia Supplicans’ Really Means

In fact, the newly-appointed Catholic Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Robert McElroy, has an even more bold strategy to wipe out homosexuality from the human condition.  Unlike Fernandez who made plain that sexually-active same sex partners are not admitted to the sacraments, McElroy has promoted the idea that it would be far more efficacious for the aim of ending homosexuality to invite the latter to go ahead and receive holy Communion.  Explaining his anti-homosexuality strategy in America magazine last year, McElroy wrote:

As Pope Francis reminds us, the Eucharist is “not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.” To bar disciples from that grace blocks one of the principal pathways Christ has given them to reform their lives and accept the Gospel ever more fully.  For all these reasons, I proposed that divorced and remarried or LGBT Catholics who are ardently seeking the grace of God in their lives should not be categorically barred from the Eucharist.”

That McElroy has his sights squarely set upon ending the sexual intimacy between same-sex Catholic couples did not stop The Advocate magazine, the flagship LGBTQ publication, from conferring upon him the crown of “LGBTQ ally.”  The Advocate article announcing McElroy’s appointment as the Archbishop of Washington reported nothing whatsoever about the Cardinal’s ecclesiastical agenda to stamp out homosexuality from the human condition, but rather designated him “pro-LGBTQ” because he opposes “animus toward the LGBTQ community” and “expressed sympathy” for the LGBTQ community after the 2016 Pulse night club massacre in Orlando.  Opposing mass murder of gays by madmen is now considered a “pro-LGBTQ” credential.

After this pope’s religious maneuver in “Fiducia Supplicans,” and its warm public reception by many “LGBTQ” advocates and allies, no sentient human being should ever again assume that a rainbow flag-waving “LGBTQ” person, or an “LGBTQ ally” has any serious moral, religious or spiritual commitment to defending homosexuality as a divinely-originated human capacity.

For those of us who do hold that commitment, might it not be better to embrace the actual use of full sentences to convey our values and beliefs, as opposed to blindly, robotically repeating a string of letters in the alphabet that are, demonstrably, just as easily utilized by people who are hellbent on wiping out homosexuality from the human condition?


Timothy Villareal, a former Catholic, is now an Episcopalian.  He was a LGBT youth activist in the early 1990s as a teenager.  His social and religious commentaries have been published by the Washington Post’s On Faith, Christian Century, Tikkun, Chicago Tribune, Austin American-Statesman, Albany Times-Union, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Tallahassee Democrat among other U.S. dailies.


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