An Open Letter from Catholic Action for Faith & Family 

to the Association of US Catholic Priests

We Will Not Accept a Different Gospel

Monday, June 12th, 2023

Dear Fathers in Christ, 

Catholic Action for Faith & Family – a lay organization – is based in the very city where you  are holding your June 12-15 assembly, and we write this letter to you to raise our voices in  protest of your decidedly secular and deceptive agenda to alter the Catholic priesthood.  

We deeply esteem the sacred priesthood of Jesus Christ, and in the face of any attack on it  – when others would be penalized if they raise their voices – we will not be silent as you  come to our city.  

We cannot state this clearly enough: you are leading people away from the truth of Christ  and His Church. 

Your mission is disingenuous at best and pernicious at worst. You call yourselves US  Catholic Priests rather than Roman Catholic Priests. You claim many points of fidelity to the  established teachings of the Church while at the same time lobby to undermine them. You  are holding your synod in a gay-friendly venue in California during so-called “Pride Month,”  but you seem prouder of this disorder than of our redemption in Christ. 

The following are our objections to the May 4th statement that your organization released to  the media and to the US Catholic bishops: 

A False Gospel 

Gay activism is a false Gospel that you collectively preach to our Church and to our  families. It is the type of “different gospel” that St. Paul condemned in his letter to the  Galatians (1:6-9). 

There is in fact no other Gospel of Jesus Christ than the one preserved, guarded, and  handed on by the Catholic Church in her infallible teachings. That includes the Church’s  teaching about the sacrament of Holy Orders and clerical celibacy. Numerous points in your pre-synodal statement make it clear that you are perverting this holy Gospel. 

1. The opening quote, citing an allegedly gay-but-celibate priest, deserves to be  called what it is: a red herring. The US bishops’ 2004 John Jay Report showed that  80% of the overall sexual abuse scandal is due to the gay-but-not-at-all-celibate clergy.  
2. Likewise, you falsely assign “victim status” to gay clergymen as the objects of  supposed discrimination in our Church, but you offer no actual evidence of such  victimization. By any standard, “stressful and self-alienating” feelings do not qualify as persecution. On the other hand, faithful priests who dare raise their voices  against the gay agenda in the Church or in society are the ones who receive the  harshest treatments. There is no shortage of persecution for teaching what can be  known by natural law and has always been taught by the authoritative Church,  namely, that sodomy is a grave evil that cries out to heaven for punishment (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1867). 
3. You declare that “gay priests are caught between the truth of their identity and  experience, and their role as representatives of the Church and its teachings.” By  your own admission, therefore, gay men cannot be faithful to their promise to uphold  the Church’s teachings and at the same time be faithful to a gay identity. We couldn’t  have said it better. Thank you for proving the Church’s point entirely about gay  men in the clergy. 

In American culture, “sexual identity” has become a shameless idol, a golden calf, and it  seems that many priests the “US Catholic church” have surrendered to that false gospel  and ideology.  

The Question of Authority 

You attempt to replace the divinely-appointed authority of sacred Tradition with some other  authority that endorses the gay agenda. In your pre-synodal statement, various remarks  about established Church teaching brand it as 

∙ In “conflict with the principles of Catholic biblical hermeneutics”; or  

∙ Aver that it should be subject to “human and social sciences, and many biblical  scholars and theologians”; or worse, that  

∙ “The Church should encourage moral theologians in a pursuit of a new Catholic ethic  of human sexuality and sexual behavior” (emphasis added). 

Statements like these simply reinforce clerical rebellion against divine authority. Shades of Synodality 

Finally, you invoke “the spirit of synodal dialogue” perhaps to garner public support or to  lobby our bishops, or both. It’s not ironic that these words mimic the terms of a clearly  heretical movement in Germany (with the same agenda as your organization).  

True Catholics will not be part of your agenda to change the priesthood, priests of Christ. A false Gospel is false whether it is preached by clergy or laymen, by Germans or Americans,  by heretics or supposedly-faithful Catholics.  

There is only one Gospel, the one that is preached and maintained in truth and charity by  the Roman Catholic Church.  

We ask that the Association of US Catholic Priests renounce its vain attempts to undermine  the sanctity of the holy priesthood and return to the true Gospel of Jesus Christ.

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