The “Cool” Parent
Every child eventually meets the “Cool” Parent—or better yet—the “Friend” Parent — the mother or father who cannot bring themselves to say no, who mistakes permissiveness for love, who would rather be liked at 3 a.m. than obeyed at dinnertime. The house of the friend parent has rules, technically. They are printed on the refrigerator, sometimes laminated. But nobody enforces them, because enforcement risks a scene, and the Friend Parent’s cardinal sin is not a disobedient child. It is an unhappy one.
The postconciliar Church, at least in her institutional mood of the last decade, has become the Friend Parent of world religions. She still keeps the Catechism on the shelf. The Sixth and Ninth Commandments remain, technically, undisturbed by dogmatic vote. But, increasingly, the men entrusted with enforcing the house rules would rather “accompany,” “listen,” and “dialogue” than say the word no — because “no” might make someone cry, and a crying child is the Friend Parent’s worst nightmare. Worse, even, than a child raised with no operative sense of right and wrong at all.
Consider Fr. James Martin, S.J.¹ His signature project for the better part of a decade has been building an affirming, quasi-liturgical space for Catholics in active same-sex relationships — never quite endorsing what the Catechism still calls objectively disordered,² never quite declining to endorse it either. That studied ambiguity is the entire method. The Friend Parent does not rescind the rule. She simply ensures it is never actually applied to anyone she likes.
Then there is the German Synodal Way, which over three years of assemblies formally approved blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples, endorsed lay preaching at Mass, called for the reexamination of priestly celibacy, and pushed for women’s ordination to the diaconate — all passed by lopsided majorities of bishops and laity alike.³ None of it carries binding force in Rome. Most of it is being implemented in German dioceses anyway, not because Rome approved it, but because, as even sympathetic observers conceded at the time, local bishops faced enormous pressure from Church employees and brother bishops to fall in line regardless of what the Vatican said.⁴ Pope Leo XIV’s own Dicastery has since had to write to the German bishops reaffirming that such “blessing” rituals are not permitted — a rebuke that arrived years after the ceremonies had already become routine in half the country. This is the Friend Parent’s other signature move: when you cannot get the rule changed at the top of the house, you simply stop enforcing it downstairs and dare anyone to say something before the damage is done. Communion in the hand anyone?
And for those who want to see how the story ends, there is Sweden. The Church of Sweden — once the state Lutheran church of a genuinely devout nation — spent the twentieth century accommodating itself to the surrounding culture at every available turn: women’s ordination, women bishops, blessings and eventually full marriage rites for same-sex couples, a liturgy steadily planed down to remove anything that might trouble a “modern” Swede’s sensibilities.⁵ Sweden today is among the least religiously observant nations on earth.⁶ The Friend Parent’s children did not grow up admiring her boundless understanding. They grew up not calling. In short, with all the accommodation from the Friend Parent—the children STILL went “no contact.”
This is precisely the trajectory the Synod on Synodality’s now-notorious Study Group 9 seemed determined to chart for Rome herself. Tasked with developing “theological criteria... for shared discernment of controversial doctrinal, pastoral, and ethical issues,” the group’s May 2026 final report on homosexuality managed to soften the force of Revelation’s teaching on sexual morality while warmly showcasing the personal testimonies of two men in civilly recognized same-sex marriages.⁷ The report was so transparently activist in method that even commentators sympathetic to the broader synodal project were forced to call it a bureaucratic exercise dressed up as sincere listening.⁸ One particularly sharp analysis distilled the report’s operating logic into four words: doctrine is out, experience is in.⁹ As if the house rules and the tenant’s current feelings about the house rules were interchangeable documents, and the feelings were the more authoritative of the two.
This is not “shared discernment.” It is a Friend Parent’s parliamentary maneuver: hold a listening session so long, and pad it with so much sympathetic anecdote, that the actual rule quietly disappears from the conversation altogether, replaced by the far more pliable question of how everyone at the table currently feels about it.
What none of this offers — what it is structurally incapable of offering — is natural law: the older, sturdier Catholic conviction that certain truths about the human person, about sexuality, about the proper ordering of desire toward the good, are written into the nature of things themselves.¹⁰ They are discoverable by reason alone, binding on believer and unbeliever, Swede and Roman alike, whether or not they poll well at the parish listening session. Natural law does not “accompany.” It does not require a synod’s permission to say what any honest philosopher from Aristotle through Aquinas could already see plainly. It simply states what is, and trusts the adult in the room to receive it as such — because that is what fathers do. The entire crisis of the Friend Parent Church is, at bottom, a crisis of fatherhood abdicated.
And, understand, this is NOT a conversation about sexuality. It is neither judgment or affirmation. The Catechism is plain as to how such people bearing the Image and Likeness of God ought to be treated. That is NOT the issue. The issue is the process by which Truth is revealed and discovered. One thing that is true: Truth is unchanging. So, when it becomes painfully obvious that the Church is seeking ways with which to attempt an alteration to reality, it causes great distress and scandal to those of us who see the crisis of the moment.
Which brings me, uncomfortably, to confession. I had arrived there in a genuinely bad state — not rebellious, but eroding and scandalized. The lack of clarity coming out of Rome had begun to curdle into something closer to doubt itself; it is one thing to disagree with a prudential judgment and another to watch the reference points move so often that you start to wonder whether there is a fixed point left to disagree from. That erosion was not staying confined to the theology books in my head. It was showing up at my own dinner table. A father who is supposed to hand his children a stable moral order finds the job considerably harder when the institution he draws that order from keeps issuing footnotes to itself. I was struggling to maintain the very household order this essay opened with, precisely because the Church I was drawing on for the blueprint has started behaving like the Friend Parent.
Compounding it, I attend Mass at a Traditionalist community, and watching the last decade unfold from that pew is its own particular formation in marginalization. You watch the Latin Mass treated as a suspect hobby rather than the Roman Rite in unbroken continuity. You watch “accompaniment” extended everywhere except to you. The net effect, if I am honest, was not defiance — it was fatigue bleeding into something closer to despair, the sense of a Church that had energy and warmth for every constituency except the one trying hardest to simply preserve and live the faith in an increasingly difficult environment. That fatigue was doing real damage to my faith, not because the faith had yet technically changed, but because I was beginning to wonder whether anyone at the top still believed in the faith at all. No Catholic should feel such doubt or despair—yet it continues to manifest for me.
The doubt and despair bubbled to the surface with the seeming schism of the SSPX and Study Group 9. The Church, in print, has now stated that universal Truth cannot be known. Any half-way learned Catholic could understand the gravity of this moment when the Church pronounced:
Indeed, the process of synodal discernment does not proceed according to an ‘applicative’ logic (where we first reflect together to identify principles and then apply them to a concrete reality), but rather according to an ‘integrative’ logic: the ways in which a Church lives the faith and recognizes ‘emerging’ issues are an integral part of ecclesial discernment. Moving beyond an ‘applicative’ logic means not excluding oneself from the need to be converted to that “same mind that was in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5), which is the imperative for the life and witness of all disciples.
Yes. The Church suggested abandoning natural law—the foundation of Catholicism —in favor of “lived experience”—i.e., vibes.
Watching Rome’s ambiguity from the trad pew, I found myself increasingly sympathetic to the Society’s account of institutional betrayal, and increasingly uncharitable toward the Roman authorities I still, as a matter of principle and formation, want to remain faithful to. I did not want to become the kind of Catholic who writes off the Chair of Peter because the men currently sitting near it are behaving like Study Group 9. So I brought that specific sin — my lack of charity and bubbling doubts into the confessional, hoping to be helped back toward fidelity without being asked to pretend the ambiguity and gravity I was reacting to wasn’t real.
What I got instead was a diagnosis of me. The priest concluded, gently but unmistakably, that I was “too online” — that my “attachment” to the “old” Mass was very likely a trend I had absorbed from the internet rather than a considered conviction over three decades. It was a presumption related to podcasts I do not listen to and a dismissal of the volumes of books and history I had studied—including the: “Theological Criteria and Synodal Methodologies for Shared Discernment of Emerging Doctrinal Pastoral and Ethical Issues”. I was simply presumed to be part of a group chasing tradition for tradition’s sake and seeking an aesthetic rather than a faith since I couldn’t possibly understand the Mass or the Latin being used. There was not a word about the Synodal Way. Not a word about Study Group 9. Just the increasingly standard clerical reflex of the last decade: when a layman is disturbed by what Rome is actually doing, assume the disturbance is the pathology, and treat the man’s formation, rather than the institution’s confusion, as the thing requiring correction.
With genuine respect, and precisely because I mean this charitably: that is the Friend Parent’s answer, wearing a Roman collar. The entire genius of the Catholic system — the reason converts flee Protestantism for it in the first place — is that the Church does not tell the penitent to go work it out himself. She hands him doctrine that predates his feelings generated from a system of identifiable reason and a Magisterium that does not require his personal reconstruction project to arrive at Truth. A Catholic who is disoriented by institutional confusion is not disordered for noticing the confusion; he is doing exactly what the Church spent two thousand years training him to do, which is to look outward, to the deposit of faith, rather than inward, to the shifting weather of his own soul, for the difference between right and wrong. He becomes disordered only if the sole clarity on offer, even in the confessional, is “look within” — because looking within, cut loose from any external doctrine, is precisely the Protestant, and now the Synodal, answer to everything. The entire point of the Church was that I was never supposed to need it to be otherwise. But now, the Church appears to be abandoning universal, discoverable Truth in favor of “listening”, or maybe it’s “auras” or “energy” or “vibes.” Whatever, it is—it isn’t clarity.
When asked, I defiantly performed my Act of Contrition in Latin — correctly, unhesitatingly, from memory — and walked out of that confessional prideful. My sin, of course, is precisely what I had gone in hoping to shed. I will not pretend the irony escapes me: I had been absolved of one sin, marching out having committed another. It wasn’t a lack of formation, I had been dismissed and was now nursing the wound with Latin grammar. And, note what produced the pride. It was not the ancient Mass. It was being handed a faulty diagnosis instead of a rule — being told, once again, to go look within, by the one office in the entire Church whose entire purpose is to hand a man something to look at instead for clarity and formation. The problem was the “Friend Parent” had now abandoned rules in favor of the “spiritual feels.” Those who seek clarity—such as myself—are, effectively, told to “get with the new program.”
Here’s the problem: the Friend Parent has forgotten that children do not actually want a friend at the head of the table. They want a father who will say no, mean it, and still love them in the morning. So, it turns out, did Aquinas. So, it turns out, does natural law. It is long past time the Church remembered that she is supposed to be one too before it is too late and its children simply decide that if they are called to look within, they will do so in every instance—including Sunday mornings…
Endnotes
1. James Martin, S.J., Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity (HarperOne, rev. ed. 2018), and the ongoing programming of Outreach, the LGBT Catholic ministry Fr. Martin founded.
2. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2357–2359.
3. National Catholic Register, “German Synodal Way Approves Same-Sex Blessings, Lay Preaching and Reexamination of Priestly Celibacy,” Mar. 10, 2023.
4. National Catholic Reporter, “Germany’s Catholic Church approved blessings for same-sex couples. Is this a revolution?,” Mar. 15, 2023; Sacerdotus, “Pope Leo XIV’s Letter to the German Bishops: Reaffirming Doctrine Amid Calls for Change on Same-Sex Blessings,” May 2026.
5. Church of Sweden policy on women’s ordination (permitted since 1958) and same-sex blessing/marriage rites (adopted 2009).
6. Pew Research Center surveys on religious observance in Northern Europe, consistently ranking Sweden among the least observant nations measured.
7. National Catholic Register, “Lessons From the ‘Synod Study Group 9’ Debacle,” May 19, 2026.
8. Ibid.
9. Catholic World Report, “The Dangerous Error Buried in the ‘Study Group #9’ Synod Report,” June 8, 2026, discussing Farnan and Hasson, “The Scandalous Synod Report: A Betrayal of Trust.”
10. Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 94; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. V.
