June 4, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — Archbishop Emeritus of Philadelphia, Charles J. Chaput, spoke out against sexual immorality and the transgender movement on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Today last week, calling transgenderism “the final rebellion against God.”
The recently retired archbishop, appointed to the Philadelphia archdiocese by Pope Benedict XVI in 2011, linked “sex-change” attempts with the “foundational sin” of idolatry in an interview with Tucker Carlson on Friday. “You know Catholics talk about original sin, other Christian communities talk about the sin of Adam and Eve, which was they wanted to be like God. They didn’t want God to tell them what to do. They wanted to do it their way,” he said.
“Instead of giving God his due, you give to someone else or something else what belongs to God,” he continued. “That’s called idolatry. It’s a foundational sin. It’s the most dangerous sin and it’s led us down this path of making ourselves a center of creation.”
When asked about the desire of people to take on the role of God, the archbishop said, “I think that the gender issues today are the prime example of that, where we’re not even satisfied with the body that we’re born with, that we think we have the power to become something that we were not created, that I can become a woman or a woman can become a man.”
“That’s something God does, not something we do, but in some ways that’s the final rebellion against God,” Chaput added.
He also discussed the sexual revolution, describing it as another “great rebellion” against the creator and a direct contributor to sexual and gender pathologies like transgenderism. “You know, the sexual revolution was a great rebellion against God,” he said. “It was rebelling against the way God made our bodies and the way God created human sexuality, but now it’s come to the point where we even think that we should have control over the kind of human beings we are.”
Archbishop Chaput joins a growing chorus of American prelates decrying LGBT and gender ideologies in recent months. In May, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco condemned what he called the “terrible” and “very alarming” trend of minors being chemically castrated or even surgically mutilated due to gender dysphoria.
“There’s so much scientific evidence of the harm this does to children, giving them puberty blockers, and not just in terms of their sexual development but otherwise, too, [and] in other aspects of physical health,” he told the Daily Caller. “I think it’s the next step of getting further and further away from the original created order of ‘male and female he created them.’”
“A person cannot change his or her sex,” a policy enacted earlier this year by Bishop Earl Boyea of Lansing, Michigan, noted. “The human person is a body-soul union, and the body — created male or female — is a constitutive aspect of the human person.”
“Procedures, surgeries, and therapies designed to assist a person in ‘transitioning’ his or her sex are morally prohibited,” the policy, which echoes one published by Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, adds.
Archbishop Chaput’s comments to Tucker Carlson also come as the LGBT movement and its supporters, including some dissident Catholics, ramp up “pride” month propaganda — much of it sexually explicit and aimed directly at children. More than a dozen leading kids’ TV shows have begun peddling LGBT “pride” content, like Nickelodeon’s Blue’s Clues and You, which released a video starring a real-life drag queen last week.
Both the Vatican and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) have denounced gender ideology and transgenderism, the USCCB particularly highlighting the risks the ideology poses for children. “Children especially are harmed when they are told that they can ‘change’ their sex or, further, given hormones that will affect their development and possibly render them infertile as adults,” an open letter signed by the USCCB in 2017 read.
Further guidance on transgender issues from the bishops is currently “in the works,” Archbishop Cordileone told the Daily Caller last month.