Letters from Leo
An explainer on Study Group 9’s final report, the two testimonies that surprised everyone, and the synodal process Pope Leo XIV is letting run.
Christopher Hale
May 20, 2026
On May 5, three days before the first anniversary of Pope Leo XIV’s election, the Vatican released a document with a title built to put readers to sleep: “Theological Criteria and Synodal Methodologies for Shared Discernment of Emerging Doctrinal, Pastoral, and Ethical Issues.”
Within forty-eight hours, James Martin had called it historic, Cardinal Gerhard Müller had branded it heretical, and Father Gerald Murray, speaking on EWTN, used the word horrific.
The reason is buried in two appendices.
Here is what Study Group 9 is, and what its report actually does.
The body and the assignment
Study Group 9 is one of ten committees Pope Francis spun out of the Synod on Synodality in early 2024.
Each was handed a question the synod assembly could not finish in the room. Group 9 drew the hardest topic — what the Vatican initially labeled “controversial doctrinal, pastoral, and ethical issues.” Same-sex relations sat at the top of the list. The role of women, divorce and remarriage, and questions of conscience were also on the docket.
The group’s chair is Cardinal Carlos Gustavo Castillo Mattasoglio, the Peruvian archbishop of Lima. Robert Prevost — the missionary who spent nearly four decades in Peru before becoming Pope Leo XIV — knows him well.
The committee’s first symbolic act came before publication. It renamed its own assignment. “Controversial issues” became “emerging issues.” Group 9 wrote that the change was meant to register a “paradigm shift” away from a Church that hands down rulings and toward a Church that learns by listening.
