The straying sheep you have not recalled; the lost you have not sought; the injured you have not bound up; the strong you have not guarded; and even what was sound, you have destroyed. (St. Augustine, Sermon on the Shepherds, Sermon 46)
There is a particular cruelty in offering welcome without truth. It is the cruelty of the smiling gatekeeper who opens the door to a collapsing house. For many, this is no abstraction. It is the lived story of men and women like Joseph Sciambra, who endured the hellish aftermath of ecclesiastical neglect—wounded not only by sin but by the silence of those charged to proclaim the Word.
Sciambra’s life once embodied what the world calls liberation: sex, affirmation, indulgence. In San Francisco’s Castro District, he was celebrated—and destroyed. He tells of priests who encouraged him, of parishes adorned with rainbow flags, and of a Church that smiled gently while he bled. Only when he encountered those faithful to Tradition—priests who spoke clearly of Heaven and Hell, sin and grace—did his descent stop. Their fidelity, not their softness, saved him.
So, when Pope Francis called for the Church to apologize to homosexuals, Sciambra responded with a profound yes—not for past harshness but for the Church’s failure to speak the truth in love. “When I hear Catholics say ‘you were born gay,’ I think: My God, they are killing us.” He meant it literally. His friends had died. He had nearly died. What he needed was not affirmation but salvation.
This is not a footnote. It is a headline. The real victims of clerical cowardice are not those offended by doctrine but those denied it. Those who go unhealed because the Cross has been replaced with a shrug. Those who search for transformation and are handed platitudes. Those whose hunger for God is met with a soft-serve gospel that comforts but never convicts.
Into that wasteland, Ralph Martin stood as a clarion voice. Not shrill. Not angry. Clear. Over decades, through his roles at Sacred Heart Major Seminary and Renewal Ministries, Martin has consistently sounded the alarm—not with panic but with sobriety. His work A Crisis of Truth (1982) was already prophetic in its time, diagnosing the cultural and theological drift within the Church just as it began to take root. Nearly four decades later, his sequel of sorts, A Church in Crisis: Pathways Forward (2020), exposed that drift’s bitter fruit: confusion around salvation, doctrine, sexuality, and the very nature of Jesus Christ.
Martin’s thesis was and remains simple: truth is not something we invent. Truth is not a sentiment to be sculpted for palatability. Truth is a Person—Jesus Christ. In Him, we are determined. In Him, the clarity we fear is revealed not as harshness but as mercy with edges. The courage to proclaim that truth is not self-righteous indignation, nor is silence a virtue. What we are called to is respectful boldness—a Gospel-shaped courage that loves enough to speak what is eternally consequential.
And now, he has been dismissed.
No trial. No theological disputation. Only vague “concerns about theological perspectives,” offered by a newly installed archbishop whose first major act was the removal of Martin, along with other faithful scholars. It was not an act of discernment. It was a purge. A Machiavellian excision of those whose fidelity preceded him. A consolidation of control under the banner of “renewal.”
But the deeper scandal is this: truth itself has once again been made suspect by those who claim to protect it; fidelity is now framed as divisiveness; the prophetic vocation—so central to Christ, so present in the saints, so needed in this hour—is recast as theological inconvenience.
And so we must ask: What theology, then, is being preserved?
Is it a theology where ambiguity is mercy? Where pastoral fog is preferred to the hard edge of repentance? Where unity is prized more than truth, even when unity conceals a lie? If Ralph Martin’s Gospel proclamation—thoroughly grounded in Scripture, magisterial teaching, and lived fruitfulness—can be dismissed with a bureaucratic shrug, we are not witnessing prudence. We are witnessing fear—and worse: clericalism dressed as discernment.
This is not about one man. It is about the cost of clarity.
For every Joseph Sciambra, there are thousands more—unnamed and unseen—wounded by shepherds who chose ambiguity over authority, approval over truth. We will pay the price—in malformed vocations; in a generation of priests unable to speak clearly of sin and salvation; in churches where sentimentality substitutes for sanctity. And the greatest price will be paid before the Eternal Judge, where every evasion, every compromised whisper, will resound.
The legacy of Ralph Martin will not be etched in faculty minutes or episcopal press releases. It will live in the souls who heard him and found Christ. It will live in those who were not affirmed in confusion but restored in truth—those who were not made comfortable but made whole.
And that is a voice no bishop can silence.
Thank you, Ralph. We stand with you. We stand with you because we stand with Him who is Truth, in whom there is no confusion, no compromise, and no crisis, only the invitation to live—and proclaim—the Gospel without fear.
This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.
