By Hilary White
August 18, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Gender ideology is the “most worrying sign of the current ideas about man,” Monsignor Tony Anatrella, a psychoanalyst, told an audience of African bishops in Ghana late last month. Speaking on the pope’s most recent encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate,” the French priest and consultor to the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family, said that a new anthropology, a new way of viewing the nature of human beings, has grown in the last fifty years that is deeply antithetical to traditional Christian thought and jurisprudence.
“The anthropological heresies that we are having to face, once again in history, are in need of a new evangelization,” said Msgr. Anatrella. (See full talk here – in French)
“The Church,” Msgr. Anatrella said, “has always supported freedom of speech and action, and autonomy with regard to the political power, and it intends to respect and ensure respect when [the political power is] serving the common good and when civil laws honor the natural law.”
“However, sometimes there are laws that are contrary to the objective moral [law] and cannot be accepted.” He quoted the late Pope John Paul II who called for conscientious objection “when the law is immoral, including on contraception, abortion, euthanasia and falsification of marriage and affiliation with persons of the same sex.”
Msgr. Anatrella teaches at the Facultés libres de philosophie et de psychologie and at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris. He came into the international spotlight in 2005 when he penned an article explaining the Church’s teaching that men with strong homosexual inclinations may not be ordained to the priesthood.
In his lecture, “Caritas in Veritate: the Family and the Theory of Gender,” Msgr. Anatrella said that the encyclical addresses this new ideology “which, under the guise of science … suggests that man is the result of culture and it is built independently of human nature and universal laws inherent in his condition.”
“The theory of gender is the most problematic sign of current ideas about man,” and has its roots in the 18th century “Enlightenment” that started to “deconstruct the concepts of man with a different religious anthropology.”
This new set of theories rejected the “religious dimension” that “was intrinsically related to the meaning of rights” in law.
Gender theory proposes the concept that human beings have no inherent nature, but have only characteristics, including sexuality, that are molded by environment and upbringing. Thus “gender” becomes a malleable “social construct” and a person can be male or female, or neither, at will.
He said that precisely the “moral and anthropological” social destabilization warned of by John Paul II has come about in recent years.
“How can we not see that we create here a new form of violence?”
These theories, he said, are “well worn by UN agencies, NGOs, the European Parliament in Strasbourg and the Brussels Commission.”
These ideologies, he said, “take over from the secular religions that were Marxism and Nazism … An ideology replaces another ideology, stubbornly in denial of human reality by saying that man creates himself.”
At last year’s Synod for Africa at the Vatican, one of the persistent messages from African bishops was the threat posed by anti-family and anti-human ideologies that were being imposed on the continent from outside. Buti Joseph Tlhagale, Archbishop of Johannesburg and president of the bishops’ conference of South Africa, was one of the many voices warning against these ideologies that he called a “second wave of colonization” that was both “subtle and ruthless,” pushed by lobbyists who “squat at the United Nations.”
Archbishop Tlhagale warned that the “moral values embedded in the diverse African cultures” are “threatened by the new global ethic which aggressively seeks to persuade African governments and communities to accept new and different meanings of concepts of family, marriage and human sexuality.”
Archbishop Robert Sarah from Guinea, and Secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, called gender theory a “lethal ideology” that is “contrary to African culture.”
Read related LSN coverage:
Interview With Babette Francis on the UN’s Destruction of the Concept of Gender
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2004/mar/040323a.html