“Queer theology” has no place in the Church

By Jacob Phillips ( articles ) | Nov 05, 2026

Some time ago, I worked as an assistant in a university chaplaincy in a non-denominational university. Although I was a Catholic convert myself, part of the job involved attending functions held by different Christian groups. One evening there was an event for Anglican students.

The speaker on the evening I attended that chaplaincy event was a senior clergyman at London’s St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral. The talk began straightforwardly enough as a testimony like many others; recounting childhood exposure to Christianity and the loss of interest the man had experienced in his teens. But when it came to describing his return to the faith, the speaker’s focus switched from discussing faith to discussing his sexuality.

He mentioned that he’d been struggling to accept that he was homosexual during his adolescence. By reverting to Christianity, he’d assumed he’d have to break off a relationship he was having with another man, but he felt unwilling to do so. But then he learned from his peers that you can practice both manners of living with no conflict, and that those who see a conflict are in fact wrong.

At last he could finally accept Christ, he said. He came to faith within the same movement of the heart by which he finally accepted he was gay.

Perhaps this is just what one might expect in the most liberal variants of Protestantism. Yet it is worth pausing for a moment to examine the theological dimension of what such a testimony entails.

In short, it was a dramatic radicalization of what might seem at first glance just a message of welcome. It had moved a long way from differences of interpretation regarding Romans 1:27, the teaching of natural law, or indeed the nuptial personalism of Pope St John Paul II.

It was making a much bolder claim: was that God’s own identity is somehow synonymous with celebrating gay identities. The speaker was moved to faith precisely by the God that (so he was told) loved his gay relationship. What was at stake was not just some message of inclusion, but a claim about who God actually is.

I was reminded of all this last week, when the website of Outreach, an organization that self-identifies as “an LGBTQ Catholic Ministry,” founded by James Martin, S.J., posted an article entitled “LGBTQ Catholic Guide to the Mass.”

The post offers an alternatively worded confessional rite which invokes the prayers of “spiritual ancestors,” who are supposedly “queer saints.” Readers are instructed to confess as sin not their “queerness,” but rather the “degrading self-talk” society uses to “shame” homosexuality. Structural sins, including vices like “transphobia,” are also a focus of this examination of conscience. For Outreach, it is a sin to disavow sexual or gender identities, which implies that those identities are necessary for holiness.

This was a rare moment in which a typical contention of “queer theology” appeared in the Catholic world. Such “theology,” as has become common in certain Protestant denominations, is not about acceptance, or welcome, or debating traditional sexual morality per se—it involves making claims about God on the basis of rejection of that sexual morality.

Generally speaking, James Martin avoids this more radical theory around homosexuality. On close inspection, nonetheless, there are grounds to suggest his approach is still likely to land in a so-called “queer theology.”

On a recent Pillar podcast, Martin was asked whether his call for greater welcome and inclusion of homosexuals in the Church would ultimately validate whatever choices gay people might make regarding their sexuality. Martin dodged the question by pointing, as he does frequently, to the unjust discrimination against homosexuals in certain African countries. His argument was that “we’re a long way from” any carte blanche validation of gay couplings, because of the situation “worldwide,” so let’s focus on those injustices first.

This is a strange argument. It presupposes that worldwide acceptance of homosexuals is the necessary prerequisite for a subsequent drawing of the boundaries of Church teaching on marriage and sexuality.

One problem with this approach is that it’s hard to envisage how the Church can maintain that those with a tendency to same-sex attraction are welcome—as indeed they are—without reiterating a clear distinction between that tendency and the actions which often result from it. Otherwise, inevitably, the tendency and the actions would be confused, eventually seeming impossible to distinguish from one another.

Once this happens, those feeling welcomed and included can easily mistake an assuaged or excused conscience for a good conscience. According to Catholic teaching, however, a good conscience is merely soothed but is objectively in line with the moral law, and so with God the lawgiver, who is the very Good Himself.

In the confusion of the self-soothed conscience, whatever the conscience has been assuaged about is now identified with the good and the holy. Christ’s gracious love for the sinner thus slips into the conviction that He graciously loves the sin.

Then anyone who disagrees with this conviction is accused of worshipping a false god—making an idol of the traditional teaching on marriage and sexuality. Indeed, for a gay person having to bear such treatment, being actively gay and Christian appears to be an especial grace, granting a particular insight into God not given to others—actually exposing God for who He really is.

In testimonies like the one I heard that evening, the very identity of Christ became inextricably linked to a particular attitude toward same-sex relationships. Holiness, classically understood as a quintessentially divine property, was presented as synonymous with “queerness.” Thus “queer theology” amounts to a redefinition of God himself.

James Martin suggests in that same podcast that the homophobia of the Catholic Church is demonstrated by the fact that, for instance, businessmen living immoral professional lives are rarely corrected from the pulpit, nor the many regulars at Mass using artificial contraception, while so much airtime is spent on homosexuality.

One might respond by noting that none of these other forms of socially acceptable breaking of Church teaching present an alternative theology in which an active celebration of the behavior is presented as if it reflects God’s very being.

After all, a tendency toward pseudo-divine assertions and postures seems particularly prevalent in denominations where positions like Outreach’s have taken hold. London’s other Anglican Cathedral issued a supportive “Message for Pride” earlier this year, saying the event was “vital”—i.e. not an optional extra for those so inclined, but something necessary. The message states that “all the love of God is concerned about” is that people “won’t have to hide and not be who we are.” Notice that this is described as “all” that God’s love seeks, as if this interpretation of welcome is the very reason God loves human beings.

There might be much discuss about how the Church should minister to a society which has largely accepted radically new and different attitudes to questions of sexuality and gender. Outreach’s “LGBTQ Guide to the Mass” was doing much more than this, however.

To rewrite sections of the very rite which constitutes the source and summit of holiness for the Catholic tradition is to engage in “queer theology”, not merely to discuss a particular challenge the Church is facing in the contemporary age. It is to make audacious and blasphemous claims about the God who gives himself to us in the Mass—lex orandi, lex credendi—and as such, Catholics must insist that, however difficult the challenges facing the Church in this age, “queer theology” is not the answer.