However compassionate the Church is toward those who suffer from the mental illness of gender dysphoria, we have long recognized that we do people no service if we reinforce them in the illusion — particularly if the illusion is about something that really matters.

Reality is the surest route to sanity and a holy reordering. If that is true in the area of sex and identity, it is also true in ecumenical matters and in ecclesiology.

That is why so many people have felt a serious disquiet about the way in which the Pope has welcomed the Anglican Protestant archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally.

Apostolicae Curae made it clear why Anglican orders were null and void and how they always had been, while recognizing that this was in fact the original and deliberate intention of the Anglican ordinal and of the politicized ecclesiology of the 16th and 17th centuries.

The fact that Anglicans have since changed their minds and seek a degree of legitimacy from the Mother Church with which they are in schism does not change history or their credentials.

Abortion and Homosexuality

Two areas of contested theological ethics place Sarah Mullally at the far end of progressive heterodoxy.

She promoted abortion as an ethical preference, which was part of her legitimization of the feminist agenda and her repudiation of the sanctity of life in the womb as the Church has always taught. She also supported the blessing of homosexual marriages in contradiction to what the Church has always taught about marriage, sex and identity.

And it does itself no good in welcoming clergy from other denominations who embody heterodox preferences as if such clarity didn’t matter.

As the Register’s Edward Pentin has noted, in their effusive welcome of Mullally, Vatican officials extended courtesies “that went well beyond diplomatic hospitality and included gestures laden with ecclesial significance.”

These included a private audience with Pope Leo XIV and the opportunity, a first for a visiting archbishop of Canterbury, to give a blessing in the Clementine Chapel in St. Peter’s Basilica – “the very site,” Pentin explained, “of St. Peter’s martyrdom and so a place where apostolic succession is visually and spiritually concentrated.”

So, in welcoming Sarah Mullally to the Vatican with such fervor, the Catholic hierarchy has shown itself insensitive both to its own judgment of the validity of Anglican orders and to the ethical anarchy that Sarah Mullally represents.

Telling the Truth

At the same time, in terms of therapeutic integrity, it has always been accepted that to affirm someone in their self-harming delusion without any attempt at therapeutic intervention is a betrayal of responsibility to the deluded.

There may be plenty of room for discussion and discernment about the best way in which reality can be made accessible to the deluded, but just to accept the delusion without any provocation, any qualification, or any discomfort, is not kind or loving.

And in a sense, that probably sums up the dynamics of this disordered welcome. It is not so much setting love antithetically against truth as the perennial temptation of being nice rather than being honest.

If it is the Catholic view of tactics that being nice is more productive and faithful than being honest, then the case might be made for it. But that has never been the case in the past. The Catholic Church has always made a priority out of telling the truth and accepting that there is a cost to be paid for mending disorder, infidelity and rebellion.

When a penitent comes to the sacrament of reconciliation, it is a precondition that they’re willing to recognize the truth about themselves in order to find a way forward.

The Path to Unity

That might be considered the first task of the ecumenical process and even a responsibility of the Western Patriarch in the shadow of a painful, violent and disordered historical legacy.

If ecumenism is to have any integrity at all, it cannot be built on gestures that obscure reality or soften contradiction, but only on a shared submission to the truth that Christ himself embodies. Anything less risks becoming a theater of sentiment rather than a work of reconciliation.

The path to unity does not lie in the careful avoidance of difficulty, but in the courage to name it, to repent of it, and to allow the truth to do its proper work of setting us free.

Until that happens, such encounters, however well-intentioned, will remain suspended between appearance and reality, offering the form of unity without its substance, and leaving the deeper wounds of history unhealed.