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The ultimate expression of the 20th century’s Sexual Revolution, gender ideology, is an attempt to install an “inhuman revolution,” that is “a wider expression of the ‘Culture of Death,’” the Catholic bishops of Croatia said in a statement last week. The gender revolution, they said, will “completely alter not only the foundations of community life and its supporting values, but also of man.”

The 49th Plenary Session of the Croatian Conference of Bishops called upon Catholics and “all persons of good will” to resist this “danger that threatens man and his future on earth.”  

“Together with some other contemporary worldview trends, gender ideology has become established as a kind of spiritual dictatorship that uncompromisingly stifles personal and social freedom,” the statement said. “Thus is the anthropological revolution imposed ‘from the top down,’ expanding from various centers of power and seeking to draw all mankind.”

The statement, titled “Man and Woman He Made Them!” comes as the bishops prepare for the Second National Croatian Catholic Family Encounter, to be held on April 19, 2015. The meeting will have the theme “Family! The Bearer of the Life, Hope and Future of Croatia.”

The Church, the statement said, responding to “modern relativistic and atheistic culture,” must go beyond the “limits of cultures” in facing “problems and dangers which arise from the ruthless manipulation of nature.” While technology has “freed [man] to a large extent from the vagaries of human nature,” it has at the same time, “created the impression that it can completely overwhelm and subdue it.” This movement can only be achieved by the “devaluation of the natural law, which was to eliminate any impediments to human arrogance.” 

“So man, under a gradually increasing impression of [his own] power, and convinced that there is no natural, preset order of things, increasingly began to put [himself] in the place of God and claim a role for himself omnipotent creator and legislator, whose freedom is absolute.”

The bishops called this attitude “hubris” and warned that, “by historical experience,” it is a “major cause of human unhappiness.” By trying to “radically reshape the world,” in “its very nature, and set himself up as the absolute master of life and death, the measure of truth and lies, as the last criterion of good and evil, man endangers himself and all of creation.”

Gender ideology comes under a variety of names, the bishops said, including “gender theory, gender perspective, gender ideology, and more” but is always presented in public in deceptive terms like a “noble effort and the fight against discrimination,” or “advocating for the establishment of freedom and equality” or “for the realization of tolerance.”

“Gender ideology says that we are not actually women and men based on the facts of nature that define us.” Instead, a “theoretical footing of gender ideology” is the “radical separation of sex and gender.”

“The male and female sex (gender), in the interpretation of this ideology, is developed within a particular social context. As such, it is subject to a variety of social and other factors that impact it. Accordingly, the two genders, male and female, are not natural to man’s innate [nature], but are somehow imposed.” 

The statement identifies the crux of the ideology’s program: “If gender is socially constructed, it is subject to change,” therefore “this means that existing social constructs…should be dismantled.”

“This understanding of gender is revealed as one of the flagships of modern dictatorship of relativism,” the bishops warned. In practical terms, it is being “most dramatically manifested in attempts at equalization of homosexual unions with heterosexual marriage.” 

“Gender ideology works [against] marriage as a union of man and woman, and the family, as an intimate communion of love and complete humanity, replacing [it with] arbitrary types of ‘loving relationships’ and ‘family’.”

Although it is sometimes visible as a “rough and ruthless imposition,” gender ideology is more usually spread through a “subtle incarnation” in various social fields.

“Gender ideology spreads according to an accurately elaborated plan,” they said, the backbone of which “consists of ‘the law of gradualism.’” This uses “the education system, the implementation of national legislation, attacks on religion and the Church, and the refusal of debate about the practice of ‘bodily pleasures’ and their risk factors.” Instead, the emphasis is on “human rights,” “freedom of choice” and “non-discrimination.”

One of the principal areas of attack, the bishops said, is in the area of raising children, to “weaken and disable the natural identification with the mother and father that is very important for the creation of a male or female identity.” One of the most common methods of this is the use of “linguistic engineering.”

“Specifically, certain words are pushed out of use, leading to their elimination, and then to the loss of their authentic meaning and purpose. That is the real meaning and purpose of replacing the word ‘mother,’ ‘father,’ ‘husband and wife’ with ‘parent 1’ and ‘parent 2,’ ‘Partner A,’ ‘Partner B’ or ‘C’.”

“All of this contributes to the destruction of the only acceptable notion of marriage and the family, the one founded on human nature and the teachings of the Bible, as well as creating a fluid sexual identity.”

The bishops’ statement named the various international bodies working to impose gender ideology on independent countries. Implementation, they said is accomplished through “various international institutions, starting with the UN and the European umbrella institutions and into the laws of individual countries.”

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A year ago, the Croatian pro-family writer Josip Horvaticek said in an op-ed in the Italian La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, that the threat from these European gender ideologues is rivaled in the country’s history only by that of fifty years of communist dictatorship. He wrote that the new left-wing government of the “ex-Communist” Zoran Milanovic is systematically marginalizing the Church, even though the population is 86.3 percent Catholic.

“The public presence of the Catholic Church has been increasingly limited,” Horvaticek wrote. “Religion has already been abolished in some classes in secondary schools. This measure is probably an experiment before its total abolition in schools of all levels. The freedom to practice pastoral care to the police and military has been restricted,” and an attempt was made to force priests to break the seal of confession.

“We are facing a very serious danger,” he added, “more dangerous than the ideologies that have bloodied the last century: the imposition of a world view and value system that subvert the traditional Christian and human values.”

“With the ideology of gender, the natural foundations of human beings created by God as male and female is contradicted to pervert one's soul, from even the youngest age, to make slaves of disorientated sexual tendencies with the only objective to justify and glorify an unnatural and disordered sexual orientation.”

in 2013, the Milanovic government introduced the “Family Law” which proposed “same-sex marriage” and adoption, the liberalization of “soft drugs” and the legalization of euthanasia. The attempt to create “gay marriage” failed after a referendum overwhelmingly rejected it, but the government promised to continue to bring forward a “life partnerships” bill.

In the referendum, 65.8 percent said “yes” to the question: “Do you agree that marriage is matrimony between a man and a woman?” The result was also supported by 104 out of 151 parliamentarians.