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The Pope Promotes an American Heretic

The Pope Promotes an American Heretic

Last updated on: February 21, 2025 at 5:32 pm by John Gravino

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The Pope Promotes an American Heretic 2025-02-21T17:32:49-05:00 John Gravino

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Cardinal McElroy is promoted

The recent promotion of Cardinal Robert McElroy to lead the archdiocese of the District of Columbia has set off alarm bells in Catholic media. I didn’t see the story covered here at Patheos—Catholic, so I thought I would get you up to speed. Actually, I already covered the McElroy controversy last year on episode 10 of SOUL SCIENCE. I summarized the show for Peter Wolfgang over on Facebook:

Champion of LGBT equality in the Church

“Your article really is an excellent summary of the McElroy mess. In the link below, I focus on McElroy’s comments at the Los Angeles R.E.C. last year. There, he commits the same heresy being promoted by the German synod. It’s the same heresy that pushed for a gay-equality theology in the 70s and which Fr. Richard John Neuhaus blamed for the clergy sex abuse scandal. It’s this heresy that got McElroy the promotion from the pope because it was the pope who resurrected this heresy with the publication of Amoris Laetitia.

Long story short: It’s the heresy being promoted, not the man”:

https://www.patheos.com/…/podcast-american-bishop…/. FB

McElroy’s history

Wolfgang had just published an excellent article on McElroy for The Catholic Thing, and his piece was getting a lot of well deserved attention. I recommend you take a look at the article. It does a good job of describing all the angles of the controversy. And one of those angles is the heresy controversy that I describe above.

The heresy question

Here is Wolfgang:

“Which brings up another category: heresy. That’s a strong accusation. But I’m not the one making it. Rather, it was one of McElroy’s own brother bishops. Upon the announcement of McElroy’s appointment, Catholic Culture’s news section captured the history in two sentences:

In January 2023, Cardinal McElroy called for “radical inclusion” for women and homosexuals—prompting criticism from Archbishop Samuel Aquila, Archbishop Joseph Naumann, and Bishop Thomas Paprocki, who later accused Cardinal McElroy of heresy.
Cardinal McElroy subsequently wrote that Catholic teaching on the grave nature of “all sexual sins” is a 17th-century innovation.”

Confronting the Pope of Suspicion

That last sentence really gets to the heart of the heresy:

“Cardinal McElroy subsequently wrote that Catholic teaching on the grave nature of ‘all sexual sins’ is a 17th-century innovation.”

Veritatis Splendor

As I documented in my book Confronting the Pope of Suspicion, a highly successful campaign to change the Church’s teaching on homosexuality has been under way since the sixties and seventies. With the pontificate of John Paul II and his insistence on strict doctrinal orthodoxy, the movement was forced to move underground. (John Paul’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor, by the way, flatly contradicts McElroy’s laughable assertion that the Church’s sexual ethics did not exist prior to the 1600s.)

Amoris Laetitia

With the publication of Amoris Laetitia in 2016, Pope Francis breathed new life into this heretical movement. In chapter seven, he insisted that science be the indispensable foundation of sexual ethics. This premise has always been central to the gay rights movement in the Church.

Thus, I see this promotion of McElroy as a clear indication that the pope is moving forward with his heretical reform agenda. On the next episode of SOUL SCIENCE, I will do a deep dive on this developing story. So stay tuned!

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About John Gravino

John Gravino is the author of The Immoral Landscape of the New Atheism, which was the topic of a health and spirituality seminar at Duke Medical School. He continues to explore the intersection of health and religion and the other big questions of life right here at Patheos. You can read more about the author here.

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