Cardinal Grzegorz Ryś has said that sexual orientation excludes no one from the Church and has also reaffirmed Catholic teaching on sexual morality. Yet the Kraków synodal process has placed before its members a proposal for “safe pastoral havens” modelled on Faith and Rainbow, an organisation which calls every sexual orientation and gender identity “a gift from God” and campaigns for the Churches to recognise same-sex relationships. Kraków now has to explain how those things belong together.
Cardinal Grzegorz Ryś has been criticised for telling the first plenary session of the Second Pastoral Synod of the Archdiocese of Kraków that “sexual orientation does not exclude anyone from the Church”. In isolation, that sentence proves very little. Catholic doctrine does not teach that a person experiencing homosexual attraction thereby ceases to belong in the Church, becomes incapable of grace, or forfeits the pastoral care owed to every soul. Ryś himself added what many reports have omitted: the Church never ceases speaking with the sinner, but she “never enters into dialogue with sin”, and the only morally licit sexual intercourse is within marriage.¹ Those words deserve to be reported because they make the real difficulty in Kraków considerably clearer.
The problem is not that Ryś has said homosexual Catholics may remain within the Church. The Catechism says that persons experiencing deep-seated homosexual tendencies must be treated with “respect, compassion, and sensitivity”, while insisting equally that homosexual acts are contrary to the natural law and that those experiencing such inclinations are called to chastity.² Catholic moral theology has never equated an involuntary inclination with the deliberate act towards which that inclination may tend. It distinguishes the person, the inclination, the act and personal culpability. That distinction protects the dignity of the person without pretending that everything experienced within fallen human nature is therefore morally good.
What now requires explanation is the material placed before the Kraków synod itself. In the relators’ presentation of the synthesis of the synodal submissions, a section headed “Radical change of language towards LGBTQ+” includes proposals for an end to stigmatising language, an “open, honest dialogue with contemporary science about man”, “true respect for human conscience”, and the creation of “safe pastoral havens”, for example modelled on “Faith and Rainbow”.³ The presentation is hosted by the Archdiocese as part of the official synodal process.
It is important not to claim more than that evidence establishes. The synthesis is not a decree of Cardinal Ryś. It does not amount to the final conclusions of the synod, nor does its publication demonstrate that the Archbishop personally endorses every proposition which emerged from more than five hundred submissions. A synodal process is supposed to gather, arrange and test proposals before judgement is reached. That qualification should be stated plainly once, rather than used afterwards as an escape route from the awkward question the document raises.
For the awkward question remains: how did Faith and Rainbow become a proposed model for Catholic pastoral care in Kraków?
Faith and Rainbow — Wiara i Tęcza — is quite open about its aims. It describes itself as an ecumenical Christian LGBT+ organisation and states on its own website: “We believe that every sexual orientation and gender identity is a gift from God and can be reconciled with faith.” It also says that it seeks to accelerate changes in the teaching of the Churches towards recognition of the full value of marriages and other relationships entered into by LGBT+ people, including families raising children.⁴ These are not allegations made by hostile critics. They are the organisation’s own description of its theology and purpose.
That makes the choice of model difficult to understand. There is no doctrinal problem in providing pastoral support for Catholics who experience same-sex attraction. There is every reason to do so. A person may need friendship, spiritual direction, sacramental support, help in living chastely, or simply somewhere to speak without being mocked. Parents may need guidance when a son or daughter adopts an identity which they cannot accept without denying Catholic teaching. Priests may need better formation in dealing with people who arrive carrying genuine wounds, loneliness and confusion. None of that requires cruelty; none of it requires political slogans; and none of it requires the Church to alter a single article of her moral teaching.
But Faith and Rainbow does require something else. It begins from propositions which Catholicism cannot simply absorb. The claim that every sexual orientation and gender identity is a gift from God is not Catholic doctrine. The campaign to secure ecclesial recognition for same-sex marriages and other same-sex relationships is not an alternative method of expressing existing Catholic teaching. It seeks its alteration.
Kraków therefore cannot shelter indefinitely behind the word “pastoral”. Pastoral practice is never doctrinally empty. It proceeds from some account of the human person, freedom, sin, nature, grace, marriage and the purpose of sexuality. If Faith and Rainbow is being recommended merely because its members have learned how to receive isolated people without humiliating them, then the Archdiocese can say that plainly and reject the organisation’s theology. If something more is intended, then what appears to be a discussion about tone has already become a discussion about doctrine.
This is where the language of contemporary sexuality becomes especially important. The Church can and should avoid contemptuous or needlessly insulting language. That does not oblige her to adopt the categories by which contemporary sexual politics interprets the human person. Once an inclination becomes an identity, and the identity is then treated as something positively bestowed by God, the distinction between the person and the inclination begins to disappear. Moral judgement of conduct can then be made to sound like rejection of the person himself. It becomes increasingly difficult to say what the Church has always said without being accused of denying somebody’s very existence.
The result is not merely a new vocabulary. It is a new anthropology smuggled in under pastoral terms.
That is why the Kraków presentation’s call for a “radical change of language” deserves more attention than an argument about whether one particular word is offensive. Language carries the distinctions by which doctrine is understood. If those distinctions are progressively surrendered, doctrine may remain intact on paper while pastoral life is conducted according to different assumptions. The Church continues formally to teach one thing while becoming increasingly unable to say it in the places where the teaching most needs to be heard.
Catholic pastoral care begins somewhere else. A person has dignity because he is created by God and redeemed by Christ, not because every desire, inclination or asserted identity has been canonised as part of his essential self. The Church can tell somebody that he is loved without telling him that every sexual inclination is therefore good. She can oppose humiliation without affirming falsehood. She can recognise suffering without constructing a theology from it. Indeed, genuine pastoral charity sometimes requires the much harder service of refusing to tell a person that what he wants to hear is necessarily true.
That is not a special rule invented for homosexuality. It is ordinary Christianity. Every Catholic brings into the Church desires which require discipline, habits which require correction, attachments which require purification and sins which require repentance. Grace does not merely protect our existing self-understanding from criticism. It changes us. Christian pastoral care loses its object if accompaniment ceases to have conversion and sanctification as its destination.
The Kraków controversy is also a useful illustration of something Nuntiatoria has repeatedly argued about the present synodal method. The difficulty is not consultation itself. The Church has always consulted. Bishops should know what priests and laity are encountering, and the experiences of the faithful can disclose pastoral failures which chancery offices have missed. The difficulty arises between the raw material and the synthesis.
More than five hundred submissions do not arrange themselves under headings. A relator or drafting group must decide what recurs, what matters, what deserves prominence, what is marginal and what should be carried forward into the next stage. That exercise inevitably involves judgement. Nuntiatoria noted in “Synodality for the Initiated” and later in “Experts in Synodality: Leo XIV and the Rise of the Church of Process” that modern synodal structures give considerable influence to those who translate a mass of testimony into the comparatively small number of themes which an assembly is then asked to consider.⁵ The language of “listening” does not abolish mediation. It makes the quality and transparency of that mediation more important.
Kraków offers a concrete case. We do not know from the published material how many participants proposed Faith and Rainbow as a model. We do not know whether the suggestion appeared repeatedly or once. We do not know whether other groups argued against it, or whether Catholic apostolates helping people to live chastely with same-sex attraction were considered. We do know that the proposal survived the process of selection and appeared in a presentation placed before the synod. That alone makes it legitimate to ask by what criteria it was elevated.
The question reaches beyond procedure because the Church is not free to discover her anthropology by majority consultation. As Nuntiatoria argued in Accipere, non fingere, Catholicism begins with what has been received.⁶ The Church receives Revelation; she receives the moral law; she receives human nature as created rather than self-created; she receives the meaning of marriage before she considers how best to minister to those whose lives do not conform to it. Pastoral ingenuity operates within those givens. It does not have authority to reconstruct them.
That is the deeper difficulty exposed by the Kraków proposal. One approach begins from the identity claimed by the individual and asks how the Church can accommodate it. The Catholic approach begins from the created and revealed order and asks how a particular person, with all the complexity of his experience, can be helped to live within it. Both approaches may use the vocabulary of compassion. They are nevertheless moving in different directions.
Cardinal Ryś’s own words sharpen the point. If the Church speaks with the sinner but does not “enter into dialogue with sin”, and if sexual intercourse belongs morally within marriage, then Kraków already possesses the doctrinal boundary which its pastoral discussion requires.¹ What remains unexplained is the proposal to model pastoral provision on an organisation which seeks to move that boundary.
Pope Leo XIV appointed Ryś Metropolitan Archbishop of Kraków on 26 November 2025.⁷ That makes him Leo’s choice for one of Poland’s most important sees; it does not make every synodal proposal in Kraków a papal proposal. There is no evidence that Leo XIV has endorsed the Faith and Rainbow recommendation, and criticism should not pretend otherwise. Responsibility for the direction of a diocesan synod belongs in the first instance to the diocese and ultimately to the bishop who must judge what it produces.
Fr Dariusz Oko has warned that Kraków risks producing Poland’s first “rainbow synod”.⁸ That description remains a warning rather than a fair final verdict. The synod is still under way. It can still distinguish pastoral charity from ideological affirmation and make clear that the inclusion of Faith and Rainbow in a synthesis does not imply acceptance of its theology. Indeed, the fact that the process remains unfinished is precisely why the matter should be confronted now rather than after vague proposals have become pastoral structures.
Kraków does not need Faith and Rainbow in order to treat homosexual Catholics with charity. The Church already possesses the necessary principles: no humiliation, no unjust discrimination, no abandonment, and no pretence that respect requires calling every sexual inclination or asserted gender identity a gift from God. The pastoral difficulties can be complicated. The governing doctrine is not.
A synod which genuinely listens must also know when what it has heard cannot be received. That is part of episcopal discernment too.
¹ Archdiocese of Kraków, “Zakończyła się I Sesja Plenarna II Synodu Duszpasterskiego Archidiecezji Krakowskiej”, 20 June 2026
² Catechism of the Catholic Church, “The Vocation to Chastity”, §§2357–2359; Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons”, 1 October 1986
³ Archdiocese of Kraków, “Materiały do pobrania — II Synod Duszpasterski Archidiecezji Krakowskiej”
⁴ Fundacja Wiara i Tęcza, “O nas — Misja i cele”
⁵ Nuntiatoria, “Synodality for the Initiated: How Collegiality Became Permanent Process”, 14 July 2026; Nuntiatoria, “Experts in Synodality: Leo XIV and the Rise of the Church of Process”, 14 August 2026; Nuntiatoria, “When Listening Has a Predetermined Answer”, 21 August 2026
⁶ Nuntiatoria, “16.08.26 Nuntiatoria CXIX: Accipere non Fingere”, 14 August 2026; Nuntiatoria, “ACCIPERE, NON FINGERE — To Receive, Not to Invent”, 18 August 2026
⁷ Holy See Press Office, “Resignations and Appointments, 26 November 2025”
⁸ PCh24, “Ks. dr hab. Dariusz Oko: Czy krakowski synod stanie się tęczowy?”
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