ROME — Pope Francis has denounced the “evil” of gender theory in a new book, saying the ideology seeks to erase all differences between men and women.

While pulling no punches in his condemnation of “gender theory”, the pope insists that the pastoral treatment of people with homosexual inclinations is a separate matter from the top-down cultural imposition of gender neutrality.

The book, titled San Giovanni Paolo Magno (Saint John Paul the Great), was prepared by Father Luigi Maria Epicoco to mark the 100th anniversary of John Paul’s birth on May 18th, 1920, and includes commentary by Pope Francis in every chapter. The book, which commemorates the life and teachings of Pope John Paul II, is set for release on February 11th but the publisher has released sections of the book to the Italian press.

In one of these sections, Father Epicoco noted that Pope Francis often speaks of evil and asked the pope where exactly he sees evil most at work in today’s world.

In his response, Francis singled out “gender theory” as an expression of this evil, while noting immediately that “I am not referring to those who have a homosexual orientation” since these people deserve “pastoral care.”

Gender theory is “dangerous,” the pope continued, because it implicitly wishes “to destroy at the root that creative project that God wanted for each of us — diversity and distinction — by making everything homogeneous and neutral.”

“It is an attack on difference, on God’s creativity, on man and woman,” Francis said.

“If I say this clearly, it is not to discriminate against anyone, but simply to warn everyone of the temptation of falling into the foolish project of the inhabitants of Babel: doing away with differences to seek a single language, a single form, a single people.”

This attempt at uniformity led them to self-destruction “because it is an ideological project that does not take reality into account, the true diversity of people, the uniqueness of each, the difference of each,” the pontiff continued. “It is not the annulment of difference that will bring us closer, but welcoming the other in his difference, in the discovery of the richness of difference.”

“It is the fruitfulness present in difference that makes us human beings in the image and likeness of God, but above all capable of welcoming the other for what he is and not for what we want to transform him into,” he said.

While Christianity prioritizes facts over ideas, gender theory tries to impose ideas on reality, he suggested.

“It wishes to undermine humanity in all areas and in all possible educational forms,” he said, “and it is becoming a cultural imposition which, instead of rising from below is imposed from above by some nations as the only possible cultural path to follow.”

Pope Francis has been a vocal critic of gender theory for years, earning him the scorn of many LGBT activists.

In 2016, the pope referred to gender theory a “great enemy” of marriage, saying that the ideology of gender is part of a global war against traditional marriage.

We are witnessing a “global war to destroy marriage” in which gender theory laces a key role, fighting “not with weapons, but with ideas,” he said.

That same year, Francis published a lengthy teaching text on marriage and the family called The Joy of Love (Amoris Laetitia) in which he underscored the unique value of motherhood and fatherhood, neither of which is dispensable or replaceable with a unisex version of “parent.”

He also said that the “legal deconstruction of the family” taking place in many countries cannot bode well for the future of society. It is unacceptable that “international bodies should make financial aid to poor countries dependent on the introduction of laws to establish ‘marriage’ between persons of the same sex,” he said.

Francis also slammed gender theory for its denial of “the difference and reciprocity in nature of a man and a woman,” and for its dream of “a society without sexual differences.”

“An appreciation of our body as male or female,” he said, is “necessary for our own self-awareness in an encounter with others different from ourselves.” Efforts to cancel out sexual differences based in anatomy are a symptom of a sick society that “no longer knows how to deal with it,” he wrote.

The following year, the pope denounced the “unisex utopia” of the transgender movement.