(LifeSiteNews) — A German bishop has raved against “patriarchy” and traditional gender roles while claiming sexual and gender “identity” is part of God’s design for humanity.
Ludger Schepers, auxiliary bishop of Essen and “Queer affairs representative” of the German Bishops’ Conference, lamented in comments to the Catholic press agency KNA that the Church has “not only tolerated but actively promoted” patriarchal structures for centuries.
A patriarchal view of humanity has nothing to do with the Christian faith, but only with the will to power, Schepers argued. Anyone who still defends this today “betrays their own message,” said the auxiliary bishop of Essen. He said the Church must take a clear stance and not tolerate “discrimination.” He sees a return to traditional gender roles as a “misguided path.”
“The diversity of human identities – whether homosexual, transgender, or intersex – is not a modern construct, but part of God’s plan of creation,” Schepers claimed.
He furthermore stated that those who exclude people based on their perceived “identity” are not acting in the name of the Catholic faith, but in the service of an ideology that has nothing in common with Christianity.
He demanded that the Church include “queer people” and take “all genders” seriously.
He criticized the online “tradwives” trend as an “artificial aesthetic with no grounding in reality,” and he warned about reinforcing traditional gender roles and said that a return to such roles is “a threat to freedom and equality.”
Schepers is known as a radical modernist who promotes the LGBT agenda and attacks the Church’s teaching of there being only two sexes.
Regarding homosexuality, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states:
Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.
READ: Heterodox German bishop criticizes public act of reparation for Vatican LGBT ‘pilgrimage’
Likewise, the idea, based on gender ideology, that there are more “genders” than male and female is condemned by Church teaching and contrary to the natural law.
As Franciscan priest Father Terrance Chartier explained, “As an ideology, [transgenderism] contradicts natural law and divine revelation, so to affirm it would be sinful. It would be actually a sin against the First Commandment, so a sin against the virtue of faith, against the divinely revealed truth about human sexuality.”
Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, echoed those remarks, describing transgender ideology as “self-mutilation of mind, soul, and body” and blasting its promotion as a “serious sin.”
The Vatican under Pope Francis had also repeatedly condemned gender ideology, including in Francis’ declaration Dignitas Infinita.