For nearly four decades, English-speaking Catholics have quoted the Vatican on a sentence it never actually wrote.

I speak here of Section 16 of the 1986 Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons (hereafter, Pastoral Letter). A single missing word in an early English translation caused many Catholics to misread the tone of the document fundamentally. Despite an eventual correction from the Vatican, the mistranslation had already shaped Catholic argumentation and discourse. It continues to do so today.

My purpose here is twofold. First, I want to sketch the discursive landscape this omission helped create. Many Catholic organizations have, to their credit and in spite of this omission, avoided drawing unfortunate conclusions about the lives of gay people in the Church. Others have not. Secondly, I will propose a path forward, one that I believe is essential, given the Church’s long-standing insistence that words matter, because words matter for souls.

What follows will move between text, spiritual anthropology, pastoral discourse, semantics, and experience. In this case, these are not separate debates, but rather inseparable and mutually reinforcing problems.

The Omission

Let’s begin with the passage in question. Section 16 of the Pastoral Letter reads as follows:

“From this multi-faceted approach there are numerous advantages to be gained, not the least of which is the realization that a homosexual person, as every human being, deeply needs to be nourished at many different levels simultaneously. The human person, made in the image and likeness of God, can hardly be adequately described by a reductionist reference to his or her sexual orientation. Everyone living on the face of the earth has personal problems and difficulties, but challenges to growth, strengths, talents, and gifts as well. Today, the Church provides a badly needed context for the care of the human person when she refuses to consider the person solely [emphasis added] as a ‘heterosexual’ or a ‘homosexual’ and insists that every person has a fundamental identity: the creature of God, and by grace, his child and heir to eternal life.”

Bear the word “solely” in mind as you observe how Catholic Answers treats the quote in just a couple of its articles on the topic of homosexuality. I’ll underline the relevant sentence to help guide your eyes. First, I’ll quote at some length a 2017 article from Trent Horn:

“The problem with this argument is that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the concept of ‘business.’ There are immoral businesses, but the idea of business or commerce itself is not wrong. A better comparison for the label ‘LGBT Catholic’ would be ‘pornographer Catholic,’ or ‘polygamous Catholic.’ Moreover, the ‘LGBT’ labels reduce a person to his sexual behavior, which would be dehumanizing even if that behavior weren’t disordered. A person should be defined by his vocation and status as a child of God, not by his sexual proclivities.

…

Likewise if his request were dishonest. For example, I do not refer to people who received Ph.D.s from unaccredited universities with the title ‘Dr.’ That kind of person hasn’t properly earned that title, and to refer to him that way would involve propagating a lie and cheapening academic degrees in general. In the same way, if I consistently referred to someone as a ‘gay Catholic,’ I would be telling a lie about that person, reducing his identity to a disordered desire. I would have also conjoined the person’s Catholic faith with a serious sin. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith puts it this way:

“The human person, made in the image and likeness of God, can hardly be adequately described by a reductionist reference to his or her sexual orientation. Every one living on the face of the earth has personal problems and difficulties, but challenges to growth, strengths, talents and gifts as well. Today the Church provides a badly needed context for the care of the human person when she refuses to consider the person as a ‘heterosexual’ or a ‘homosexual’ and insists that every person has a fundamental identity: the creature of God, and by grace, his child and heir to eternal life.’”

And again in 2022, in yet another article from Trent Horn on a group of German priests who announced their sexuality publicly:

“Notice that these Catholics are not ‘coming out’ in the sense of asking for mercy as they struggle to live chastely in accord with the Church’s teachings. There is no acknowledgment of sin—like what we see when St. Paul confesses, ‘I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? (Rom. 7:15, 22-24)

Instead, this is a celebration of disordered sexual attractions and a demand that the Church do the opposite of what Paul advised in Romans 12:2 and conform itself to this world and its sinful ways. So how should we respond?

First, we should not encourage this kind of attitude through terms like gay Catholics. This reinforces the idea that any sexual desire is a core part of a person’s identity that should be recognized and even celebrated. According to the CDF:

“The human person, made in the image and likeness of God, can hardly be adequately described by a reductionist reference to his or her sexual orientation ….[The Church] refuses to consider the person as a ‘heterosexual’ or a ‘homosexual’ and insists that every person has a fundamental identity: the creature of God, and by grace, his child and heir to eternal life.’”

“When priests with same-sex attractions say they don’t want to ‘hide their identity,’ they have failed to understand both their true identity as children of God and their identity as spiritual fathers to God’s children.”

The common thread is that the word “solely” simply isn’t there. The omission is easy to miss, but its effects are not trivial, especially given the overall theme of Horn’s argument and how he uses this passage as a key magisterial anchor. Thankfully, it is easily explained — in fact, the reason for the discrepancy has been named many times before.

Ron Belgau, a prominent writer and speaker among Side B Christians,[1] previously blogged about this translation problem in the Pastoral Letter. The first promulgations of the English and French versions mistakenly omitted the word “solely,” thereby distorting the meaning of the Latin text, an error not found in the corresponding German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese documents. Belgau’s article was subsequently taken up by Cristina Traina at New Ways Ministry. In 2013, Joshua Gonnerman similarly argued the point in an article in First Things.

The difference now, in the year 2026, is that the text has been formally revised. I’ve been unable to locate any official statements or press releases from the Holy See calling attention to the precise date and circumstances of the revision. I’m happy to amend this article if anyone points me to one. I therefore can only assume that the Vatican recognized the problem somewhere down the line (whenever and however that was) and fixed the English text. Regrettably, the correction came too late to prevent the mistranslation from recirculating ceaselessly across the Anglophone Catholic world.

It would require an entire essay unto itself simply to list every occurrence of the truncated passage. Well into the search, I ran out of steam. Indeed, there are still other articles at Catholic Answers that make the same error — such as this 2013 article from Daniel Mattson. Here are documents from various Catholic-affiliated institutions that do the same: the Courage sub-site at the Diocese of Rapid City, Homiletic and Pastoral Review, Catholic Stand, New Advent, New Ways Ministry, and multiple locations at EWTN (here and here, perhaps among others yet unfound).

Spiritual Anthropology: The Whole-Human Homosexual in the Pastoral Letter

Let me get straight to the point, then: this omission has enabled too many misinterpretations that bury the overarching logic of the Pastoral Letter. If one reads the passage without the full context of the document (and, at that, in a highly rigorist manner), the omission exerts a pivotal, meaning-altering effect on the sentence.[2] Without the adverb, the Vatican seems to deny any form of operative self-understanding based on sexuality. With it, it merely relativizes sexuality with respect to a more fundamental identity rooted in Jesus.

We should be thankful that the document does include the word “solely.” If it didn’t, it would actually weaken the document as an analysis of important human realities: the person, whether human or divine, is implicitly and unavoidably relational. It would even pit the document against its own internal logic — throughout, it invokes and assesses the very categories of ‘homosexual persons’ (i.e., gay people) and ‘homosexual persons who are Catholics’ (i.e., gay Catholics). Still more, it names many social realities that shape the common psyches of gay people.

I am a Side B gay Catholic myself. I’ve been walking the path the Church has set before me for many years. I know very well what it means to pursue costly obedience to Jesus in this area. I also know that costly obedience isn’t the only, or even overriding, aspect of my experience. Homosexuality durably shapes one’s life and psyche in innumerable ways that are entirely non-sexual, non-sinful, and frankly not even sin-adjacent. (To say nothing of the fact that “attraction” as a reality in itself isn’t reducible to concupiscence; it also irreducibly involves promptings to constructive love, to recognition of virtue, and to admiration of personal strengths. It prompts a variety of vocations – intellectual, interpersonal, self-sacrificial – that instantiate models beyond married life.) This happens on both spiritual and material levels, many of which are directly reflected in the text of the Pastoral Letter.

Let’s take a look at spiritual realities first. From what I can see, a detailed reading of Scripture makes it exceptionally difficult for a gay person not to make their sexual orientation a major facet of their self-understanding. Consider the following lines from Isaiah 56:4-5:

“For thus says the Lord: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose what pleases me, and who hold fast to my covenant, I will give them, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters, an eternal name, which shall not be cut off, I will give them.”

Matthew 22:30 famously states that the institution of marriage fades away in heaven. By contrast, the passage above states that a eunuch’s earthly surrender to the will of God stands as an eternal referent. I’ve long felt uplifted by this passage: I believe it sends a message of hope and visibility directly to Catholic gay people, given how Jesus Himself abstracts and expands the definition of the eunuch (Matthew 19:11-12).

The passage from Isaiah underscores why the mistranslation of the Pastoral Letter has such cost: it obscures the visceral ways that sexual orientation, even and especially when lived in obedience, becomes a central conduit for God’s enduring grace. Then-Cardinal Ratzinger names this explicitly in Section 11 of the Pastoral Letter: “As in every conversion from evil, the abandonment of homosexual activity will require a profound collaboration of the individual with God’s liberating grace.” Profound collaboration. Think for a minute about what those two words entail. Inescapably, they point to God’s provision of grace to the person as a homosexual person. One must definitively accept one’s own reality and communicate with God on that basis. One must take stock of one’s own life, frankly admit the joys and struggles, achievements and challenges, and honestly approach God with such an appraisal. In exchange, God offers (as I’d attest from my own experience) a deep sense of nearness and accompaniment that makes the journey worth traveling.

Onto material realities. We needn’t focus on eternal spiritual rewards to know or intuit that homosexuality will deeply form a gay person’s life in countless, indelible ways. It will lead gay people into communities of fellow-feeling with other gay people, whether any of those people are sexually active or not. It’s worth naming just a few of the (and I re-iterate: entirely non-sinful, nor even sin-adjacent) ways this is so – some of which may even find a particular, inflected resonance with other social groups known for bonding as intentional communities:

• The sense of “trauma humor” that many of us share.
• The strange habit we have of using jocular self-deprecation as a form of triumphalism.
• The way that the notion of chosen family resonates with us, especially those of us who have been expelled from our homes.
• The burden we feel that we must begin almost every conversation with an exhausting series of mental calculations.
• How, when we look at a world map, we shudder at the thought of setting foot in half of the countries on it.
• Our profound commitment to “taking care of our own.”
• Our shared experience of navigating a world that will never be fully designed with us in mind.

(On that last point, the gay experience and the Catholic experience will soon meaningfully converge: as global society becomes more secular and values drift, Catholics too will increasingly encounter a world that isn’t made with us in mind.)

Some of the less exuberant aspects of gay self-understanding from above appear directly in the Pastoral Letter. Section 10 acknowledges that the world can be physically and verbally abusive to us, a burden of awareness that often shapes our everyday movements and decisions. Section 15 “heartily encourages” Church organizations where gay people associate with one another and “take care of their own,” provided that Church teaching is robustly affirmed. In the case of celibate gay Catholics specifically, Section 12 accurately predicts the multi-layered scorn we receive from a world that often sees us as nothing more than a fifth column against gay rights.

Much has happened since 1986. Our paradigm for ministering to gay people has shifted focus multiple times: from moral argumentation, to acknowledging costly obedience, to encounter and accompaniment, and now finally to an awareness that intimacy and love must be upfront and palpable if someone is to feel stably anchored in this teaching. The Church now seems more eager than ever before to develop tactics and options to help gay people achieve intimacy and love in ways that comport with Church teaching. I’d point to Fiducia Supplicans, which acknowledges in Section 31 that sexually active gay relationships have certain elements that are “true, good, and humanly valid,” which can and should be retained as people eager to follow Church teaching re-shape those relationships into deep friendships.[3] The formalization of this point is a gift to Side B people, who have pursued this very line of inquiry for as long as we’ve been in the public square.

Pastoral Divergence: A Typology of the Mistranslation’s Downstream Effects

Many Catholic writers cite the mistranslation of Section 16 as a reason to tiptoe around the centrality of homosexuality in a gay person’s life. This caution manifests with varying degrees of intensity: some writers are simply uneasy and indecisive about how to follow the section’s apparent commands; others go to extremes, curating both terminology and claims to keep even the slightest whiff of “identitarian” thinking at arm’s length.

I would love to present an exhaustive account that minutely details all the different ways the mistranslation has been deployed. That would a require an entire book, however. Instead, I’m going to focus on four separate examples (with parallel examples outlined in footnotes) that reflect four typical “cases.” These are:

• A – Cases where public Catholic figures deploy the text purely to argue for child-of-God status but seem unaware of how gay people are impacted by the truncated passage
• B – Cases where people form tenuous intellectual barriers around labeling people as homosexuals
• C – Fierce compartmentalizing, if not wholesale bracketing, of homosexual (and even heterosexual) orientation
• D – Awkward deployments in more LGBT-sympathetic spaces where an apparent lack of awareness of textual history leads to incomplete conclusions

Case A: Foregrounding Child-of-God Status — But Inadvertently Raising the Eyebrows of Gay People[4]

Cardinal Basil Hume of England developed a set of pastoral guidelines for gay people in April of 1997. He actually began the document in 1993 but made several revisions following feedback from the public.

On balance, I find this a positive document. From a Side B perspective, the most meaningful moments come when Cardinal Hume lays down constructive principles about relational life. As when he says in Section 9: “In whatever context it arises, and always respecting the appropriate manner of its expression, love between two persons, whether of the same sex or of a different sex, is to be treasured and respected.” Or in Section 8: “It is a mistake to say or think or presume that if two persons of the same or different sexes enjoy a deep and lasting friendship then they must be sexually involved.” Or, in a different sense and on a different sub-topic, in Section 15: “Furthermore, ‘homophobia’ should have no place among Catholics.”

Cardinal Hume’s opening theological gesture is fully grounded in Section 16 of the Pastoral Letter. It is clear that his intent here is simply to call attention to the child-of-God status of gay people; however, the passage suffers from sub-optimal wording that might have been avoided if an accurate translation were available at the time:

“The Church recognises the dignity of all people and does not define or label them in terms of their sexual orientation. ‘The pastor and counsellor must see all people, irrespective of their sexuality, as children of God and destined for eternal life.’ The [CDF] states this even more fully: ‘The human person, made in the image and likeness of God, can hardly be adequately described by a reductional reference to his or her sexual orientation. Every one living on the face of the earth has personal problems and difficulties, but has challenges to growth, strengths, talents, and gifts as well. Today, the Church provides a badly needed context for the care of the human person when she refuses to consider the person as a heterosexual or a homosexual and insists that every person has a fundamental identity: a creature of God, and by grace, his child and heir to eternal life.”

Cardinal Hume exhibits no hesitancy around use of the term ‘homosexual person,’ as he invokes it repeatedly throughout the remainder of the document. That fact forces a very specific reading of his opening statement in the above quote — something like “The Church recognises the dignity of all people and applies a primary definition to their lives that is not simply grounded in their sexual orientation.” Again, a noble intent, but the gravitational well created by the absence of “solely” seems a bit too strong here.

Am I just being overly sensitive to this small nuance? I think not. The problem with saying that “the Church doesn’t define you by your sexual orientation,” however well-meaning, is that gay people don’t have the option of not being defined by it. As I’ve alluded to before and will address more fully in the subsequent section, that statement can come across as a minimization of the cyclical and routine challenges (and overcomings) that define our lives. It’s just not reasonable to expect someone to cordon those things off. Thankfully, I don’t think Cardinal Hume means to do that here.

Case B: Walking on Terminological Eggshells

Other articles evince how the truncated version of Section 16 can create a conscious and anxious scrupulosity around terminology. In a 2012 Homiletic and Pastoral Review article, Steven Schultz carefully avoids orientation-based labeling in an effort to remain faithful to the text as he received it. In this case, he addresses the American Psychiatric Association’s history of engaging with the topic of homosexuality:

“The psychiatric community admitted at the time that this move [the dropping of homosexuality from the diagnostic manual] did not ‘so much reflect a scientific judgment on the cause or nature of homosexuality, as the view that to label homosexuality as abnormal is to stigmatize persons who are content with this condition, and to encourage homophobia and discrimination against them.’ Note here that we are not ‘labeling’ the person; we are speaking of ‘orientation,’ not person. [Emphasis added.] Indeed, as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) teaches, “the Church provides a badly needed context for the care of the human person when she refuses to consider the person as a ‘heterosexual’ or a ‘homosexual,’ and insists that every person has a fundamental identity: the creature of God, and by grace, his child and heir to eternal life.’ The importance of understanding human sexuality in the light of a proper understanding of the human person, male and female, is a point to which we shall return.”

This passage becomes a type of tightrope-walk. Its assiduous avoidance of “labels” — labels which are precisely the descriptive language employed throughout the Pastoral Letter itself — reads as an overshadowing of the broader logic of the text. It’s at this point that the logic of “the person must come first” implicitly starts to emerge.[5] Therefore, Schultz’s preferred term of art is the “homosexually oriented person,” which simply adds unnecessary contortions to the conversation.

In fairness, Schultz’s article pre-dates Gonnerman’s 2013 piece in First Things and the Vatican’s later revision of the English text. His reliance on the earlier version is therefore understandable.

Case C: Maximal Compartmentalization[6]

That charitable reading becomes more difficult, however, when we direct our attention to articles that post-date both Gonnerman’s and Belgau’s publications. By then, the translation problem had already been identified in widely read Catholic academic journals. At minimum, one might expect heightened attentiveness before invoking the Pastoral Letter as a magisterial anchor.

Let us return, then, to the Trent Horn articles cited above. Horn’s argumentation departs from a premise that he makes explicit throughout his articles: any term that “reduces” people to a sexual desire or a sexual action is inherently problematic. I’ve taken that issue up substantially already and will dive even deeper into the matter in the following section. Suffice it to say, it does not appear that Horn has considered the possibility that gay people, when using the term gay, are attempting to name a greater totality about their lives than sexual acts and desires. (An attempt, as it happens, that is valid whether or not one adheres to Church teaching.) In the same vein, it also does not seem that Horn has considered the possibility that homosexuality, as a phenomenon in itself, isn’t reducible to sexual acts and desires in the first place.

This logic plays out at several points across Horn’s writing, but let’s just take one example. In one article Horn writes: “Notice that these Catholics are not ‘coming out’ in the sense of asking for mercy as they struggle to live chastely in accord with the Church’s teachings.” Is that the only alternative to “coming out while asking for a fundamental reversal of marriage”? For many of us, coming out simply means living more honestly with the people in our lives, easing the exhausting pre-conversational calculations I mentioned before. It can also deepen Christian friendship by allowing others to share a burden we would otherwise carry alone, which is precisely the kind of mutual support Scripture commends: “Bear one another’s burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2).

The logic takes on more extreme proportions elsewhere. Horn’s most striking claim is an analogy between the descriptor “LGBT Catholics” and hypothetical phrases such as “pornographer Catholics” or “polygamist Catholics.” This comparison collapses under minimal scrutiny. “Pornographer” and “polygamist” describe chosen acts or relational arrangements. “Gay,” by contrast, names a durable pattern of attraction and the lifelong navigation that follows from it. One may cease producing pornography and thereby cease being a pornographer; one may exit a plural marriage and thereby cease being a polygamist. A celibate man attracted to other men does not cease to be gay in the ordinary sense of the term. The analogy therefore rests on a basic asymmetry.

Across these and other examples a clear pattern emerges. Homosexual self-understanding is repeatedly reduced to inclinations ordered toward particular sexual acts, with little attention to the broader human realities that shape a person’s life. Horn does express compassion for “persons with same-sex attractions,” but the phrase itself frames the person almost exclusively as the bearer of a narrow sexual phenomenon.

This narrowing becomes especially evident when the mistranslated passage from Section 16 is invoked. In Horn’s articles, the quotation appears alongside claims that no sexual desire should be recognized as part of a person’s identity and that self-description as gay reflects a failure to grasp one’s true identity as a child of God. Reinsert solely in its proper place and the argument simply loses its force. The passage no longer forbids acknowledging sexuality as one aspect of self-understanding; it simply refuses to make that aspect definitive.

Case D: When LGBT-Sympathetic Ministries Seem Unaware of Document History[7]

The issues around Section 16 also appear awkwardly in writings from ministries often (fairly or unfairly) portrayed as opposed to Church teaching. For instance, in a 2023 article at Outreach, David Palmeiri introduces the correct version of Section 16 as part of an analysis of the Synodal working documents. It’s unclear from this article whether Palmeiri is aware of the translation history of the Pastoral Letter and its broader effects. He attributes resistance to LGBT terminology to a prior line in Section 16, rather than the line missing “solely: “The human person, made in the image and likeness of God, can hardly be adequately described by a reductionist reference to his or her sexual orientation.” Except, as we know, the Pastoral Letter routinely and unproblematically describes people according to their sexual orientations as a simple matter of logistical necessity.

Eden Invitation: A Big Gulp of Fresh Air

I encourage everyone interested in these issues to explore Eden Invitation, an orthodox Catholic ministry founded by and for people with LGBTQ+ experiences. Operating with the approval of the Archdiocese of Minneapolis and present at the National Eucharistic Congress, the ministry approaches these questions with noticeably less anxiety. In a blog post titled “The Church Didn’t Forget You,” the mistranslation appears again, but does not introduce unreasonable distortions. Eden Invitation simply acknowledges that sexual orientation is one of the many meaning-shaping realities of a person’s life:

“Desires, abilities, weaknesses, or backgrounds don’t define us in themselves. That includes labels regarding gender, sexual preference, or emotional leanings. The human person is infinitely complex.” [And then quotes the truncated version of Section 16.]

The ability to draw this sensible and anodyne conclusion even from the mistranslation of Section 16 is almost certainly a result of Eden Invitation being led by LGBTQ+ people themselves. EI further explores the durable dimensions of LGBTQ+ life that remain even when someone commits to chastity—the friendships, forms of solidarity, and patterns of experience that shape a person’s life beyond sexual activity. If EI were a physical library, its shelves would groan under the weight of reflections on these enduring dimensions of human experience.

The Terminology Problem: What is “Gay,” Actually?

Underlying this discussion is a dispute about the admissibility of the term “gay.” Some Catholics indeed prefer to be described as “same-sex attracted people.” That preference and boundary deserve respect. Others, however, do not share it. For many of us, the preference runs in the opposite direction, for reasons that follow directly from the foregoing analysis.

The Church seems loath to label people according to concupiscence. Why, then, do people insist so doggedly on calling us “people with same-sex attraction,” which narrows the focus down to what the Church considers a concupiscent phenomenon? It stands to reason that we’d be eager for terminology that captures the richer contours of a gay person’s life — contours that remain even after deciding to live in harmony with the Church. It’s no surprise that conversations which only allow for “SSA” phrasing tend to discuss homosexuality in terms of compartmentalization, admonishments against sex, hush-hush treatment, and “hard truths.”

“Gay” instead foregrounds the complex life-world we inhabit, including orientation and the (I re-iterate once more: non-sinful, nor even sin-adjacent) ways we positively shape our lives in response. This may seem counterintuitive to those who avoid the term to prevent “conjoining faith with sin,” but I will expand on this in what follows.

People who insist on the term “people with same-sex attraction” generally follow one of two lines of thinking. Some claim that “gay” implies a combination of inclination, sexual activity, and activism, a maximalist position concerned that the word smuggles political agendas into conversations and institutions. Others claim that “gay” refers merely to same-sex attractions, a minimalist view that deeply puzzles over why someone would be so eager to define themselves so narrowly. Both approaches, however, miss the point.

When people describe themselves or others as “gay,” they are referring to two inescapable realities: the durable fact of same-sex attraction and the lifelong necessity of structuring one’s life around that fact.[8] Unlike sexual activity, which is fully avoidable, these two realities are unavoidable — and thus are the only necessary requirements for being gay. A person could live a life as chaste as driven snow, from birth to death, and still be fully gay. Gabriel Blanchard, a Side B blogger, addressed this point in an open letter to Fr. Dwight Longenecker years ago.

This is why it is both semantically coherent and analytically justifiable to utter either end of the following dyads: “chaste gay person” or “promiscuous gay person”; “religious gay person” or “irreligious gay person”; “self-loving gay person” or “self-loathing gay person”; “intensely Catholic gay person” or “fiercely anti-Catholic gay person.” If “gay” meant “inclination + activity + activism,” at least half of these terms would be incoherent. Even if it referred only to attraction, they could technically work, but would be far less meaningful.

I admit I did not always explicitly recognize how the term highlights the work of lived navigation. That realization came as I sorted through my sometimes-tempestuous reactions to SSA language. The distinction grew even clearer when I first noticed a subtle difference between my reactions to the terms “people with same-sex attraction” and “people who experience same-sex attraction.” Though I ultimately appreciate neither option, the second one sounds slightly less harsh to me. It treats one’s life experiences much less like a vestigial appendage ready for surgical removal and more like something that constructively contributes to one’s sense of self, even if guardrails against sin must be present.

Let me round out the point with a personal anecdote. I know and spend time with far more gay people than the average Catholic. Many of them are secular and sexually active. When I tell them that I’m celibate and Catholic, they don’t stop calling me “gay.” The reason is simple: “gay” means precisely what I mentioned above.

I think there’s an instructive analogy available here, even if no analogy is perfect. Consider the differences between the terms “deaf person” and “person with hearing impairment” (a phrase I’ve rarely, if ever, heard in ordinary speech). “Deaf” immediately gestures toward a full life-world: sign language, institutions built for accommodation, shared experiences, and daily navigation of a world structured around sound. “Person with hearing impairment,” by contrast, narrows the focus to physiology.

Given how broadly the resistance to the term “gay” has spread in some corners of the Church, it’s positively surreal to return to some of the stodgy old diocesan policy documents of the 1980s that variously allow and even encourage the use of the term “gay.” From Baltimore:

“Because of prejudice and misunderstanding, men and women with a homosexual orientation (more properly spoken of as gays and lesbians) have suffered public ridicule, social exclusion and economic hardship, thereby denigrating their human dignity by denying them respect, equality and full participation in society.”

One finds similar comfort in the use of these terms (and in the extent to which the focus turns to matters of social justice) in a document from the Washington State Catholic Conference. The Diocese of San Jose has a 1984 document that even goes so far as to acknowledge a right to call oneself gay or lesbian.

It’s at this point that we should return once more to Section 16. Notice an earlier line in this same section: “The human person, made in the image and likeness of God, can hardly be adequately described by a reductionist reference to his or her sexual orientation.” This line does not say that one can’t be described by one’s sexual orientation at all. It says that one can’t be adequately described by a reductionist reference to one’s sexual orientation. In light of the discussion I’ve developed here, I find an unexpected (and perhaps ironic) added layer of meaning in this line: there is no term in the current market of labels that functions more reductively than the term “person with same-sex attraction.”

Unburdening Ourselves of the Mistranslation

I found it interesting to see this article in the Cebu Daily News on February 15, 2026. Reflecting on the meaning of love as Valentine’s Day approached, Fr. Steban Marie Etienne of the Brothers of Saint John, whose mission is based in the Philippines, reproduces the accurate version of the English translation and avoids the extreme conclusions the mistranslation elsewhere engenders. He uses the terms many, if not most, of us prefer and says forthrightly that we shouldn’t be defined solely by our attractions, upholding Church teaching in the process. This is a positive initial sign that we’re entering a phase where the correct translation is the norm.

Perhaps this is one of those instances where the global Church holds answers that the Anglophone church does not. (Especially since it’s the global Church that got the correct translations in the first place.) I’d therefore direct people to the introductory quotes from recent guidelines on LGBT pastoral ministry released by the Archdiocese of Baltimore. This lucidly worded, warmly compassionate, and entirely orthodox set of principles presents a strong contribution to the ongoing conversation of how to integrate LGBT people into Church life. It seems to bear the marks of deep consultation from LGBT people themselves and foregrounds strategies for effective community building and accompaniment.

Of note is the introductory quote from Pope Francis, which takes on new meaning given our discussion: “And people should not be defined only by their sexual tendencies: let us not forget that God loves all his creatures, and we are destined to receive his infinite love.” I couldn’t agree more. But Pope Francis has the good sense not to say “people should not be defined by their sexual tendencies at all.”

So, with all this under our belts, what should next steps be?

There are two separate forms of accountability required here. The first ensures the accurate transmission of Vatican documents. The second remedies argumentation built upon the inaccurate quotation.

To see why this matters, consider a brief thought experiment. Imagine an alternate universe where the omission in question was not the word “solely” in the Pastoral Letter, but rather the word “unjust” in “every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard is to be avoided.” [CCC 2358] I have no doubt that many of the outlets who have (perhaps innocently) recirculated the mistranslation of Section 16 would hasten to call attention to the absence of that other, critical qualifier. It distorts the Church’s very specific understanding of what “discrimination” means — namely, the attempt to draw objective distinctions, some of which will be well-founded, others of which may in the final analysis be unfounded. It also thereby pushes the meaning of the document far beyond its original intent.

At a minimum, I think the following measures are necessary:

• Organizations who re-printed the mistranslation without commentary should update the text immediately, ideally with annotation noting the translation history.
• Organizations who invoked the mistranslation to sideline the role of homosexuality in a person’s lived self-understanding should retract those articles. They misapply Section 16 and stretch the text beyond its meaning, imparting overwrought conclusions to the faithful.

Vincent G’Sell is a pseudonym. I have no public platform, nor do I want one. I prefer to live a quiet, peaceable life out of common view. The knowledge of this, however, has forced me into an exhausting and intolerable hermeneutic vigilance. I’m not asking to be “affirmed.” I’m asking not to be misquoted at.

An adverb may seem small. But in a Church that teaches that the Word became flesh, we should hesitate to say that any word is small. When we quote carelessly, we catechize carelessly. And when we catechize carelessly, we pastor carelessly. That is a point of agreement we all hopefully can share.

Notes

[1] For those unaware, “Side B” is a term used by Christians who are gay and adherent to traditional sexual ethics. It has many counterparts: “Side A” represents the affirming side, “Side Y” represents those who agree with traditional sexual ethics but reject the use of what are often termed “identity labels,” and “Side X” refers to those who engage in conversion/reparative therapy and/or feel they have achieved a substantive change in the nature of their attractions.

[2] I want to stress that I think the truncated passage can be read in a way that preserves the meaning of the version with “solely.” As we’ll see, many Catholic leaders, writers, and organizations have taken the passage in precisely that sense — to communicate that nothing can and should overshadow one’s identity as a child of God. The exclusionary, dichotomous view is more a product of ideological pre-commitments than anything else.

[3] For more provocative thinking on this issue, see Eve Tushnet’s thoughts in Church Life Journal here.

[4] One of the earliest examples of this problem comes in a New York Times opinion piece from 1986, written by Msgr. Daniel Hamilton in response to criticism of the Pastoral Letter as harmful to the emotional and spiritual safety of the entire gay community. Section 16 figures critically in this brief riposte, an attempt to underscore the inviolable spiritual dignity of gay people. Regrettably, Msgr. Hamilton’s letter is deeply hamstrung by the absence of “solely.” He seems unaware that many gay people, including those adhering to Church teaching, will likely feel uneasy about a document that, on a false face value, “refuses to treat” them for what they are. Msgr. Hamilton’s message would have been greatly bolstered by an accurate translation.

Other Church documents issued soon after the Pastoral Letter waste no energy fidgeting around the label “homosexual” or with addressing the coherence of “homosexual communities.” Consider the 1990 USCCB statement Called to Compassion and Responsibility: A Response to the HIV/AIDS Crisis. The document reproduces the mistranslation of Section 16 in footnote 32, yet it nonetheless acknowledges the concrete reality of homosexual communities—something that would be difficult to explain without some form of shared self-understanding.

The bishops write, for example:

“Numerous volunteer groups and organizations, including those of the homosexual communities, have made significant efforts in caring for those with HIV and have developed new and effective services to help meet the many unmet needs of those who are ill.”

Elsewhere the statement recognizes how stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS sometimes turned into violence against gay people:

“HIV and AIDS have had a terrible impact on the homosexual community… Violence against those perceived to carry HIV… is a serious problem… This type of violence is unacceptable and should be condemned by all Americans.”

In this case, the placement of mistranslation of Section 16 in a footnote actually minimizes its impact on a casual reader. Nevertheless, an attentive reader might wonder why the overall document adopts the tone it does while including a seemingly opposing statement as a reference.

[5] The logic of “the person must always come first” is made explicit in a 2020 post from Father Stephen Wojchichowsky at the website of the Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of Edmonton. We see here the viewpoint that the truncated version of Section 16 requires the term “person with same-sex attraction” above the term “homosexual”:

In an earlier document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith entitled On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons (#16), we read:

The human person, made in the image and likeness of God, can hardly be adequately described by a reductionist reference to his or her sexual orientation … Today the church provides a badly needed context for the care of the human person when she refuses to consider the person as a ‘heterosexual’ or a ‘homosexual’ and insists that every person as a fundamental identity: the creature of God and, by grace, his child and heir to eternal life.

Therefore, one does not speak of a homosexual, but a person with same-sex attraction. The person always comes first. As such, we do not assume what is in a person’s heart simply because he or she is attracted to persons of the same sex.

Fr. Wojchichowsky’s move here reads awkwardly even before one re-inserts “solely” in its appropriate place — he says one does not speak of a homosexual, but sees fit to include the title of the Pastoral Letter, which itself names homosexual persons?

[6] Bernard Toutounji wrote a brief piece for Catholic365 in 2015 entitled “There are No ‘Gay’ People” and argues that sexuality-based labels can only cause affront to human dignity. For Toutounji, self-description as gay or straight — or indeed, even as “homosexual” — can only blind one’s pure self-vision as a child of God. The mistranslated version of Section 16 provides the magisterial locus of his argument.

[7] In an article from 2017, Francis DeBernardo of New Ways Ministry addresses public messaging from Bishop John Toal of Scotland and references the mistranslated version of Section 16. This is a particularly interesting case where New Ways Ministry dramatically (but also effectively) reinterprets the tone of the truncated passage. In responding to Bishop Toal’s endorsement of Courage, a chastity support ministry, DeBernardo argues for the outdatedness of that ministry model, in that it focuses too narrowly on chastity as the core struggle of a gay person. Instead, ministries that focus on the whole person as a child of God provide the better approach. DeBernardo anchors his point in the claim that gay and lesbian people shouldn’t be viewed primarily as homosexual. One wonders, however, whether even this positive re-framing is at least slightly in tension with the correct translation.

[8] You’ll notice that I’ve avoided using the word “identity” or “identity labels” in this essay when referring to the word “gay.” This is very intentional. So much of the time, people see an “identity” as something that one positively claims, diligently fashions in light of one’s will and/or desires, and then grows into or sheds as life progresses. There may be some people who use the term “gay” in that sense, but for most the term is a rich descriptor, not an identity claim. I might “claim” to be the fan of a certain sports team and cultivate that image over time; I cannot “claim” to be gay because I have no choice in the matter.

Image: Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in his time at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. From Wikimedia Commons.