ROME — Pope Francis warned against the evil of “gender ideology” Friday and its tendency to obliterate the real differences between men and women.
“Today the worst danger is gender ideology, which cancels out differences,” the pontiff stated in off-the-cuff remarks before his opening address to participants in an international conference titled “Man-Woman Image of God” held in the Vatican’s synod hall.
“I have asked for studies to be carried out on this ugly ideology of our time, which erases differences and makes everything the same,” he said, adding that to erase sexual difference “is to erase humanity.”
This is why the present meeting is so important, he insisted.
Francis has repeatedly denounced what he sees as the “evil” of transgender ideology that proposes a disconnect between biological sex and gender identity.
The pope told a group of Polish bishops in 2016:
Today, schools are teaching children — children! — that everyone can choose their own sex. And why is this being taught? Because their textbooks are chosen by the people and institutions that give money. This is ideological colonization, promoted by very influential nations. This is terrible.
In response to the pope’s words, Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry — a “Catholic” LGBT advocacy group — said that the Pope was ignorant about LGBT issues.
“Nobody chooses a gender identity. They discover it. Transgender people come to know themselves in a process is [sic] similar to the way that lesbian, gay, and bisexual people discover their sexual orientation,” DeBernardo said.
In his letter on marriage and the family, Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”), Pope Francis underscored the unique value of motherhood and fatherhood, neither of which is dispensable or replaceable with a unisex version of “parent.”
Sex education should teach “respect and appreciation” for sexual differences as a way of helping the young to overcome self-absorption, he stated, and this respect includes acceptance of oneself and learning to embrace the body one is born with rather than playing with fictional gender “identities” that deny reality.
In that same letter, Francis 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 on anatomy are a symptom of a sick society that “no longer knows how to deal with it,” he wrote.
In March 2023, Francis said that the “gender ideology” undergirding transgenderism is currently “one of the most dangerous forms of ideological colonization.”
“Why is gender theory so dangerous?” the pontiff asked during an interview with the Argentinian daily La Nación. “Because it waters down differences, and the richness of men and women and humanity itself is the tension among differences.”
“The question of gender is watering down the differences and making the world the same, all dull, all alike, and that is contrary to the human vocation,” he said.