CHICAGO, July 17, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — A Catholic priest has described the use of the term “gender ideology” as the “boogeyman” of those promoting “right-wing political and ecclesial agendas.”
In a June article published in the National Catholic Reporter, Father Daniel Horan, the Duns Scotus Chair of Spirituality at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, attempts to cast the use of the term “gender ideology” as discrimation against “LGBTQ people” and comparable to historical examples of what he calls the Catholic Church’s “institutional sinfulness and its slow course to correction.”
The term “gender ideology” is used frequently by Catholics and conservatives to refer to developments such as the global push to redefine marriage so as to include the possibility of so-called “same-sex marriage” and the increasing promotion of transgenderism, including the push to allow children to undergo so-called “gender reassignment surgery.”
In their “Declaration of Truths” document published last year, Cardinal Raymond Burke and Bishop Athanasius Schneider, together with several other bishops, stated:
Concerning gender theory, the declaration reaffirms that ‘the male and female sexes, man and woman, are biological realities created by the wise will of God.’ It therefore terms gender reassignment surgery a ‘rebellion against natural and divine law’ and a ‘grave sin.’
Spanish cardinal Antonio Cañizares Llovera said last year that gender ideology is “the biggest threat now facing humanity,” while Polish archbishop Marek Jedraszewski has described gender ideology as the “direct path to the self-destruction of our civilization.”
But Horan argues that rather than “gender ideology,” the real problematic ideology today is an “uncritical promotion of 13th century pseudo-science and ancient philosophical theories that, while interesting and influential, are no longer sufficient to account for important developments in human knowledge and experience since the Middle Ages.”
Citing Pope Francis’s 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, Horan argues that “the presentation of a nearly eight centuries-old understanding of the human person that is somehow complete in itself apart from whatever we might learn about humanity or the world subsequently is exactly the reduction of the faith to a ‘museum piece.’”
Horan even goes so far as to suggest that St. Thomas Aquinas’s use of Aristotelian philosophy, controversial among thirteenth-century Catholics theologians, is comparable to those adopting novel ideas today “arising from studies about sex and gender.”
The Chicago-based Franciscan cleric claims that “those who invoke ‘gender ideology’ generally don't know what they are talking about” and suggests that they should study the work of academics promoting the theory that “gender” and biological sex are not necessarily the same thing.
In 2015, Horan celebrated the 2015 U.S. Supreme Obergefell v. Hodges ruling that the U.S. Constitution contains an inalienable right to same-sex “marriage,” writing in an article for the Jesuit publication America that “[a]s a Christian, the ‘joys and hopes’ of the LGBT women and men who have cried out for the recognition of their human dignity and value, these are the ‘joys and hopes’ of me today.”
Horan concluded his recent article by asserting that there is “no better time” for Catholic leaders to “learn more from natural and social sciences about the wondrous diversity of God's creation, including the manifold experiences and identities within the human family” than the month of June, when, as Horan claims, the “world over commemorates LGBTQ pride month.”
The Catholic Church traditionally dedicates June to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.