The Vatican is preparing a document on the ideology of gender, the Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith has said.
Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández made the revelation in an interview with the Spanish news agency EFE.
“We are preparing a very important document on human dignity that not only includes social issues, but also a strong critique of moral issues such as sex change, surrogacy, gender ideologies, and so on,” Fernández said. “In this sense, the most worried people will be able to rest.”
Pope Francis has repeatedly spoken against gender ideology, implicitly condemning it in paragraph 155 of Laudato Si, his 2015 papal encyclical on the environment, and describing it publicly as part of a “global war on the family”.
The Pontiff’s most recent criticisms came during a speech in Budapest, Hungary, last year when he denounced gender ideology as an examples of “ideological colonisation”.
Despite such pronouncements, some senior figures within the Church believe that the gravity of the threat posed by gender ideology os serious enough to warrant a specific papal encyclical to clearly elucidate Catholic teaching on the truth and meaning of human sexuality.
They include Cardinal Willem Eijk, the Archbishop of Utrecht, who specifically requested Vatican intervention last year when he went to Rome for the four-yearly ad limina visit of the Dutch bishops.
“I have asked if it would not be good for the pope to issue an encyclical on gender thinking,” the cardinal said at a press conference afterwards. “Gender theory is being pushed in all kinds of organisations and we as a Church have not said that much about it.”
A decade ago, Pope Benedict XVI predicted that gender ideology would be the next great challenge to the Church and the final rebellion against God.
Dr John Haas, a former member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, revealed that the late pope made the “unsolicited” observation during a private conversion at the Vatican in 2014, the year after he relinquished his petrine office.
He said the Pope Emeritus told him that “the next great challenge the Church is going to face is gender ideology, and it will be the ultimate rebellion against God the Creator”.
Haas said he was “surprised” by Benedict’s remarks because they were so spontaneous, but said he could now see his words were “prophetic”.
“We have been hit with a tsunami of transgender ideology,” Haas said in a speech in Virginia, adding that today “Catholic health care institutions are being sued because they refuse to perform mutilating surgeries on men who want to be surgically altered to look like women or [on] women who want to appear as men.
“Catholic academic institutions are also being sued and attacked as they simply try to continue to give witness to the truth of their students being either male or female,” added Haas, a former president of the US National Bioethics Centre.
One of the final acts of Pope Benedict’s pontificate was to speak forcefully against the emerging threat of such ideology, which dismisses biological and scientific categories of male and female in favour of an individual constructing a “gender” of their own choosing.
In an address to the Roman Curia given at Christmas 2012, less than two months before he stepped down, the German pope noted that “the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question”.
He said that according to the “new philosophy of sexuality”, sex is “no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society.
People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.”
He stressed: The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious.”
Referring to the biblical creation account, the Pope said “being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God.”
Now, however, “this very duality as something previously given is what is now disputed,” the Pope said. “Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will.
“The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be.”
The result, he said, is that “man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human are disputed.”
But without the “pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation”, the Pope warned, “then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation. Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him.”
Pope Benedict also addressed the tension between freedom and human dignity: “When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being.
He concluded: “The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears.
“Whoever defends God is defending man.”
