Some Vatican documents arrive with trumpets. This one came with a fog machine. Dated October 1, 1986, but not reported publicly until October 31, the “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons” — known by its Latin opening words, Homosexualitatis problema, and to generations of queer Catholics simply as the Halloween Letter — has now haunted the Church for 40 years. As the National Catholic Reporter observes in an anniversary piece published this week, its message has not exactly been exorcised.

The letter’s principal author was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) — the office once known, with considerably less euphemism, as the Holy Office of the Inquisition — and it went out with the approval of Pope John Paul II. Eighteen and a half years later, Ratzinger would become Pope Benedict XVI. To understand his papacy, and much of what still makes LGBTQ+ Catholics flinch at Mass, you have to start here.

What the Letter Actually Said

The 1986 letter was framed as a correction. In 1975, the CDF had issued a declaration on sexual ethics that condemned homosexual acts while conceding that some people’s orientation was not of their choosing. Progressive theologians and pastors read that as a door left ajar. Ratzinger read it as an error. The new letter complained that the 1975 text had been given an overly benign interpretation and slammed the door: the homosexual inclination itself, while not a sin, was “a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil,” and therefore had to be regarded as an objective disorder.

That is the phrase that stuck, and it is easy to see why. It moved the Church’s critique from what gay people do to who gay people are. Not just the act but the orientation — the self — now carried the taint.

The letter went further. It warned bishops against what it called “deceitful propaganda” from pro-gay groups and instructed them to withdraw support from any organization that did not clearly state that homosexual activity is immoral. No names were named; none needed to be. Everyone understood the targets to be DignityUSA, whose chapters had met in Catholic parishes for years, and New Ways Ministry, the outreach founded by Sister Jeannine Gramick and Father Robert Nugent. The letter was even released in English rather than Latin — unusual for a Vatican text, and a tell about which national church Rome had in its sights.

Then came the passage on violence, which remains the document’s most notorious. Ratzinger first called it deplorable that gay people had been objects of malice in word and deed. In the very next breath, he argued that the proper response to such crimes was not to claim the homosexual condition is anything but disordered — and that when civil law protects behavior to which, in his view, no one has a right, neither the Church nor society should be surprised if irrational and violent reactions increase. Critics then and since have read it as one hand offering sympathy while the other shrugged at gay-bashing.

What turned doctrine into wound was the timing. In the autumn of 1986, AIDS was killing gay men by the tens of thousands, and the letter itself invoked the danger to life and health to cast gay advocates as reckless. For a community burying its friends, the Vatican’s idea of pastoral care looked a lot like a eulogy for the wrong side.

The Enforcer

The fallout was immediate and practical. Within about a year, the great majority of Dignity chapters — then overwhelmingly housed in Catholic facilities across the U.S. — had been evicted. In New York, the response was theatrical: for years afterward, the block of Fifth Avenue in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral became the most contested ground of the annual Pride March, with marchers chanting “Shame!” at the barricaded church and carrying placards caricaturing the cardinal as a rat. Ratzinger, rodent — the pun more or less wrote itself.

Ratzinger enforced the letter case by case. That same October, acting on his instructions, the head of the Jesuits told Father John McNeill — author of the groundbreaking The Church and the Homosexual — to abandon his ministry to gay people or face expulsion. McNeill refused and was dismissed from the order. In Seattle, Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, criticized in part for permitting a Dignity Mass in his cathedral, had his authority over ministry to gay Catholics transferred to an auxiliary bishop. And in 1999, after an investigation that dragged on for years, Ratzinger ordered Gramick and Nugent to cease pastoral work with gay and lesbian Catholics altogether.

The language migrated, too. The 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, drafted by a commission Ratzinger chaired, codified homosexual acts as “intrinsically disordered” and the inclination as “objectively disordered” — the version most Catholics still meet in confirmation classes today. In 2003, as same-sex marriage debates heated up worldwide, Ratzinger’s CDF issued another document urging Catholic lawmakers to oppose any legal recognition of same-sex unions.

Pope Benedict: The Letter, Enthroned

When Ratzinger was elected in April 2005, gay Catholics didn’t need an introduction. His papacy carried the Halloween Letter’s logic from theology into institutional policy.

Seven months in, the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education issued an instruction, personally approved by Benedict, declaring that the Church could not admit to seminaries or ordain men who practice homosexuality, show deep-seated homosexual tendencies, or support so-called gay culture. Men with merely transitory tendencies had to have overcome them at least three years before ordination as deacons. In 2008, Benedict approved a clarification that the ban applied to every house of priestly formation, without exception. Arriving as it did in the wake of the clergy-abuse revelations, the policy was widely criticized for implicitly pinning the abuse crisis on gay priests — an association the 1986 rhetoric of disorder had made all too easy to draw.

Benedict returned to the theme from the papal pulpit as well. In his 2008 Christmas address to the Roman Curia, he invoked an “ecology of man” in defending the created order of male and female — remarks widely reported as likening the protection of traditional gender roles to saving the rainforests. In late 2012, he cast same-sex marriage, alongside abortion and euthanasia, as a threat to peace. DignityUSA’s Marianne Duddy-Burke would later describe his reign as the period in which many LGBTQ+ Catholics experienced the harshest religiously justified discrimination of their lives.

There is an irony here that has not aged gracefully. A pontiff so preoccupied with the supposed disorder of gay people presided over the years when the Church’s long-concealed abuse crisis broke open globally — and history has judged the institution’s handling of that scandal far more harshly than it ever judged two men holding hands. Benedict resigned in 2013, the first pope to do so in nearly six centuries, and died on December 31, 2022.

Francis Cracks the Door

His successor famously asked “Who am I to judge?” within months of his 2013 election. Pope Francis went on to say that being homosexual is not a crime, wrote warmly to Sister Gramick — the very nun Ratzinger had silenced — on her 50 years of ministry, and in December 2023 approved Fiducia Supplicans, permitting priests to offer brief, non-liturgical blessings to same-sex couples. That reversed a 2021 CDF ruling that the Church could not bless such unions.

But Francis never rewrote the vocabulary. The Catechism language stands. The seminary ban was reaffirmed in a 2016 Vatican document on priestly formation, and in 2024 Francis himself was reported to have used a vulgar Italian slur for gay men while discussing it with Italian bishops behind closed doors, prompting a Vatican apology. Welcome, in other words — without un-writing the rules that made the welcome necessary.

Leo XIV: The Door, Held at Its Current Angle

Pope Leo XIV, the Chicago-born Robert Prevost elected in May 2025, has largely maintained that equilibrium. This spring, he signaled that the Church would not move beyond Fiducia Supplicans to formal rites of blessing, and in May he reaffirmed that the family rests on a stable union between a man and a woman.

Yet that same month, he authorized publication of a synod study-group report that, for the first time in an official Vatican document of its kind, included testimony from two gay Catholic men in civil marriages — one American, one Portuguese — and acknowledged the Church’s role in the solitude and stigma many LGBTQ+ people and their families endure. The report described the deep suffering caused by so-called reparative therapies, though it stopped short of a formal doctrinal condemnation. Conservative bishops called it alarming; advocates called it historic.

The shift in atmosphere is real. Gramick told NCR that after four decades, her community has been “welcomed back into more official quarters.” Duddy-Burke, responding to the synod report, put the stakes in four words: “Experience must inform dogma.”

Does It Linger?

Short answer: yes — and not merely in the archives. The letter’s operative idea, that the orientation itself is disordered, remains official teaching. The seminary ban remains in force. Earlier this year, a coalition of traditionalist Catholic groups petitioned Leo to revoke Fiducia Supplicans while reaffirming that homosexual acts are objectively and intrinsically disordered. And just this week, New Ways Ministry reported that several U.S. bishops are backing local anti-LGBTQ+ ballot measures.

New Ways has spent October publishing a series of essays titled “Forty Years in the Desert,” and its contributors make the case that the damage is as much interior as institutional. One essay argues the letter still supplies ammunition to anti-queer Catholics and communities and effectively formalized homophobia as church policy until the Francis era. Another, by Jesuit Father Lucas Sharma, notes how many LGBTQ+ Catholics can still recite the phrase about intrinsic disorder and roughly date when they first heard it — and how statements like it continue to push younger Catholics out the door, Leo’s pastoral tone notwithstanding. Theologian Annie Selak writes that the letter gave a name to a harm that had long been felt but never spoken.

DignityUSA, which is marking the anniversary with its own four-part reflection series, offers the counter-narrative. Evicted from parish halls, the organization didn’t fold; it hardened. At its first national convention after the letter, in July 1987, delegates voted nearly unanimously to affirm that same-sex intimacy can be loving, life-giving, and life-affirming — a direct repudiation of Rome. That defiance, in hindsight, looks less like dissent than like a 40-year head start.

Not everyone in the Church sees the anniversary as an occasion for regret. Conservative Catholic outlets have marked it by defending the letter as a clear-eyed, even courageous statement of doctrine, and by dismissing its critics as dissenters. That split is, in its way, the letter’s most durable legacy: two Catholic churches, sharing pews, reading the same sentences in opposite directions.

Forty years on, the Church has learned to say “welcome.” It has not yet learned to say “sorry,” or to retire the word “disordered.” Francis opened a window; Leo has kept it cracked. But the ghost Ratzinger summoned on Halloween 1986 still has the run of the house — and it still speaks in the Catechism’s voice.

This article was compiled and drafted with the assistance of AI and reviewed and edited by QulturVultur’s editor.