VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) – Pope Francis warned Friday that gender ideology is the “ugliest danger” facing society today because “erasing differences” between man and woman “is erasing humanity.”
The remarks were given Friday morning at the Vatican at a symposium organized by the Research and Anthropology of Vocations Institute (CRAV). The event is a two-day international conference in Rome titled “Man, Woman, Image of God: For an Anthropology of Vocations.”
“It is very important that there is this meeting, this meeting between men and women, because today the ugliest danger is gender ideology, which cancels out differences,” the Pope said.
The Pontiff underscored the way in which transgender ideology attempts to blur the sexual differences between men and women, saying it “makes everything the same.” But, he warned, “erasing differences is erasing humanity.”
“Man and woman, however, are in a fruitful ‘tension.’ Man and woman are created by God and are the image of the Creator; that is, they carry within themselves a desire for eternity and happiness that God himself has sown in their hearts and which they are called to realize through a specific vocation,” he insisted, reiterating Catholic teaching that sexual difference and complementarity are established by God as Creator.
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However, in contrast to the Pope’s latest remarks condemning transgender ideology, in November, many Catholics were shocked and scandalized when the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) issued instructions concerning the admission of “transexual” persons to the sacraments, allowing them such roles as sponsor for baptism and confirmation.
The move was widely understood as an attempt to impose the acceptance of “transgenderism” in practice upon the whole Church, in contradiction to authentic Catholic moral teaching and previous statements issued by the Vatican concerning the same issue.
Similarly, transgender ideology and its acceptance was featured in Rome’s October Synod on Synodality, along with a long list of sinful sexual lifestyles at odds with the Commandments and Catholic teaching on marriage and sexuality.
Pope Francis previously made headlines in November 2023 when he invited a group of transgender “women” to take part in the Vatican-hosted lunch for the poor and sat opposite a “transgender” former sex worker. The guests were from a transgender group in Torvaianica – a seaside town southwest of Rome infamous for its sex workers and drug trade – and came with their local priest, Father Andrea Conocchia.
As LifeSiteNews has reported, Pope Francis has made welcoming transgender groups to his weekly papal audience a consistent theme. Conocchia’s group of “transgender” individuals first formed during COVID-19 restrictions. The group, heavily composed of sex workers, was without a regular form of income due to the restrictions and thus gathered in Torvaianica. They were personally invited by the Pope to receive COVID jabs over Easter in 2021.
According to the Associated Press, members of the group make a monthly trip to Pope Francis’ weekly general audience, at which they are given seats of honor. And they are not the only pro-transgender or LGBT groups welcomed by the Pope: Numerous such groups document and praise their meetings with Francis at the audiences.
READ: Pope welcomes dissident LGBT activists, lesbian partners in latest scandalous audience
However, the push to promote and accept transgenderism and the confusing stance of the Pope on the issue, in which his actions appear to differ from what he says, have met with strong opposition among well-known voices of orthodoxy within the Church’s hierarchy.
Cardinal Gerhard Müller denounced the Vatican’s approval of transgender godparents, saying in November, “Transhumanism in all its variations is a diabolical fiction and a sin against the personal dignity of human beings, even if in the form of transsexualism and terminologically spruced up as “self-determined gender reassignment.” The doctrine and practice of the Roman Church clearly prescribes: “The harlot, the fornicating man, the one who mutilates himself, and anyone else who does something that is not spoken of (1 Cor 6:6-20) should be rejected [from the catechumenate and baptism]” (Traditio Apostolica 16).”
READ: Cardinal Müller responds to Pope Francis’ dubia on ‘transsexual’ godparents, baptisms
At the same time in the U.S., the Catholic bishops are working on formalizing an instructional document to follow the letter that the doctrinal committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops published in March condemning “gender-transitioning” surgeries and puberty blockers. In the letter, the bishops identified the underlying errors of dualism and the rejection of God’s will as Creator of the human race and author of the sexual difference between man and woman.
READ: US Catholic bishops condemn genetic engineering, transgender surgeries and drugs
In February, Archbishop Jesús Sanz of Oviedo, Spain, warned against the acceptance of gender ideology as nothing less than a sinful attempt to “play God.”
“Gender ideology has penetrated the Church,” he said. “The anthropological confusion that has to do with the relationship between man and woman, with the truth of the male, with the truth of the female, and with the pedagogy of letting children grow healthily without redirecting them so that they can affiliate themselves to your perverse anthropology… All this has penetrated the Church. We see this when in schools, in teaching, and even in catechesis there are expressions and gestures in which one recognizes an ambiguity or, clearly, a capitulation.”
Taking to task the Vatican’s confusing stance on transgenderism, given the document approving transgender persons as godparents, Sanz continued, “This approach to transsexualism is indicating that I want to create man, as God created him. And, therefore, I allow myself to create or recreate him according to my ideological proposal. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith does not clarify this point and, therefore, leaves the door open, with a notable dose of ambiguity, for someone to have to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ afterwards. In the particular churches, it is the bishops who have this responsibility.”
READ: ‘Gender ideology has penetrated the Church,’ Spanish archbishop warns
The spreading acceptance of transgenderism within the Church was evidenced last week when a church run by the Jesuits in the Archdiocese of Atlanta promoted both a transgender movie and a pro-LGBT retreat in its parish bulletin. Under the heading “Community News,” St. Thomas More Catholic Church in Decatur, Georgia invited parishioners to gather to view a trailer for “The Monk: Telling Transgender Stories of Faith, Calling, and Vocation.”
READ: Jesuit church promotes transgender documentary, LGBT retreat with priests, deacons
Or is pushing woke ideology within the Church limited to western countries. In December 2023, the St. Peter’s Pontifical Seminary in Bengaluru, India 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 the “Gender Dilemma” seminar held 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.
However, Catholic dogma, revealed in the first pages of Sacred Scripture that God has created man male and female and intends sexual difference and complementarity to find its fulfillment in marriage between a man and a woman, cannot change.
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