Pope Francis issues opinion on transgenderism and other new gender ideologies

Pontiff laments society “no longer knows how to deal” with basic questions
BY THOMAS D. WILLIAMS, PH.D.

Pope Francis sounded the trumpets this week, warning believers against the precepts of transgender ideology, specifically its claim of fluid sexual identity among children.

In his new letter on marriage and the family, Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”), Francis said that sex education should teach “respect and appreciation” for sexual differences, as a way of helping the young to overcome self-absorption. This respect includes self-acceptance and learning to embrace the body one is born with, rather than playing with fictional identities that deny reality.

In a convergence of faith and science, the pope said that especially when experiencing difficulties with gender identity, “the young need to be helped to accept their own body as it was created.” Thinking that we enjoy “absolute power over our own bodies,” Francis warned, leads to the delusion that “we enjoy absolute power over creation.”

“An appreciation of our body as male or female,” he added, is “necessary for our own self-awareness in an encounter with others different from ourselves.”

An effort to cancel out sexual differences based in anatomy is a symptom of a society that “no longer knows how to deal with it,” he wrote. As he has done in the past, Francis decried an ideology of gender that “denies the difference and reciprocity in nature of a man and a woman and envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family.”

Thomas D. Williams is a former Catholic priest who writes for Breitbart and other national publications