ROME — A new Vatican questionnaire offers respondents a third option when declaring their sex, namely: male, female, and other.
The questionnaire, titled “The Church listens,” aims to collect people’s opinions about the Church, the results of which “will be sent to the Synod of Bishops, which will meet in Rome in October 2023, to give new life to the Church.”
“Pope Francis wants to know how we see the Church and what we think the Church should do to bring her closer to us so that we can move forward together,” explains the survey, which is the brainchild of Monsignor Lucio Adrian Ruiz, Secretary for the Vatican’s communications department.
Further along, the survey asks whether respondents think that the Church “listens/speaks with other social groups? LGBTQI+, journalists, labor unions, businesspeople, other religions, scientists?”
Again, among options for commitments the Church should make to draw nearer to people is the answer: “assist and accompany LGBTQI+ persons.”
While Pope Francis has urged the Church to treat all persons with great respect as children of God, he has also insisted that God creates human beings as male and female.
In 2016, Francis published a lengthy teaching text on marriage and the family called The Joy of Love (Amoris Laetitia) in which he criticized 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.
That same year, the pope referred to gender theory as 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 plays a key role, fighting “not with weapons, but with ideas,” he said.
Four years later, the pope wrote that gender theory is “dangerous” 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.