BENGALURU, India (LifeSiteNews) — The Catholic St. Peter’s Pontifical Seminary in Bengaluru, India recently hosted a workshop promoting “LGBTQQIP2SAA identities” and celebrating the “higher than ever” representation of LGBTQ characters and relationships on television.
Presentations shared with LifeSiteNews from a “Gender Dilemma” seminar held Friday at one of the oldest Catholic seminaries in India show that various religious brothers and sisters as well as a “transgender” guest speaker promoted gender ideology and homosexuality in talks moderated by priests of the seminary.
Remarkably, one of the religious sisters who spoke, Sr. Gadesula Jyothsna, promoted an extreme form of gender ideology in her presentation in which she advocated an evolving LGBTQ acronym, stressing the importance of “naming” to identify people’s different “sexual and gender identities.”
She explained the meaning of the letters in the newest “‘LGBTQQIP2SAA” acronym, which accounts for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, pansexual, two-spirit, asexual, and ally” identities.
According to Sr. Jyothsna, “There are many more gender and sexual identities in the LGBTQIA+ community, since our understanding of ourselves and others is always changing and evolving.”
Her presentation defied Catholic teaching on sex (“gender”) and the natural law, as did other talks at the conference. The speakers generally assumed the legitimacy of being “transgender,” that is, having a gender identity that “does not match the gender … assigned at birth,” in Sr. Jyothsna’s words.
This idea stands in stark contrast to Scripture, which declares that God created humans male and female.
In promoting homosexuality, Sr. Jyothsna and other conference speakers contradicted Catholic Church teaching that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,” “contrary to the natural law,” “close the sexual act to the gift of life,” and “do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity,” and, therefore, “Under no circumstances can they be approved.” (CCC 2357)
This teaching is also based on Sacred Scripture, “which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity,” the Catholic Catechism notes. St. Paul teaches that “Neither fornicators, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor sodomites shall possess the kingdom of God.” (1 Cor. 6:9)
Sr. Jyothsna further promoted “visibility” as an “LGBTQ+ community” member, which “can be an important way to feel a sense of pride in individual identity,” she wrote in one slide presentation.
The religious sister went so far as to celebrate the growing prominence of LGBTQ characters on television, claiming that it is “good news” that, according to a recent report by the LGBT media-monitoring group GLAAD, “the representation of LGBTQ characters and relationships on television is higher than ever previously seen on TV.”
The seminary conference’s endorsement of gender ideology was made even clearer by its chief guest speaker, the “transgender” Dr. Akkai Padmashali, founder of Ondede, an advocacy group for “gender non-conforming” people.
Dr. Padmashali, a man who presents as a woman, objected to the “umbrella” terminology LGBTQIA+ because it does not account for working-class communities in India such as the “transgender” community of “Jogappa,” whose members reportedly decide to “marry a goddess” in order to “become a woman.”
The prominent LGBTQ activist went on to decry the identification of people by their biological sex instead of their self-chosen “gender” as a “conservative, sexist, anti-feminist perspective of thinking.”
“What I decide is my gender,” he said.
He also rejected as a “Christian colonial perspective” the ideas that sex should be reserved for a man and a woman for procreation, and that otherwise sex is “against the order of nature.”
“Now the question is: What is against? What is order? What is nature? And who decides this?” Dr. Padmashali said.
He did not otherwise reference Catholic teaching on sexuality but cited Pope Francis’ 2013 statement regarding gay people, “Who am I to judge?”
This statement by Francis was also referenced in an inaugural address by Fr. Antony Lawrence, the president of St. Peter’s Pontifical Institute.
“The Pope could have said that homosexuality is wrong or disorder. But he did not say that,” Fr. Lawrence noted.
One speaker, Brother Ravi, even attempted to justify “transgenderism” using Scripture, claiming that the Ethiopian eunuch referred to in the New Testament in Acts 8 was “transgender.”
The wildly heterodox nature of the conference is made all the more disturbing by the fact that seminarians were called on to educate their future parishioners about gender ideology and homosexuality.
Brother Michael Shalom Jerry reportedly said during his presentation, “So maybe when we get into the crux and understand what it really is, then it might create a change. And as priests and religious in the future and brothers, we have the ability, and we have the platform to educate others based on this, who are not aware of this.”