Pope Francis lambasted leftist gender ideology during an address this week, warning that it presented an extreme danger to mankind. He made the remarks while speaking Friday morning to members of the French-based academic organization Research and Anthropology of Vocations Institute (CRAV).
“It is very important that there is this meeting, this meeting between men and women, because today the ugliest danger is gender ideology, which cancels out differences,” he said, adding that through extreme ideologies like transgenderism, the Left is pushing to “make everything the same.”
“Erasing differences is erasing humanity. Man and woman, however, are in a fruitful ‘tension,’” Francis said.
The remarks were similar to comments that he made last March during an interview with journalist Elisabetta Piqué at the Argentinian daily newspaper La Nació.
“Gender ideology, today, is one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations,” Francis said. “Why is it dangerous? Because it blurs differences and the value of men and women. All humanity is the tension of differences. It is to grow through the tension of differences. The question of gender is diluting the differences and making the world the same, all dull, all alike, and that is contrary to the human vocation.”
The Pope explained that while he was not planning to write anything extensive on the topic of gender, he did find it necessary to address the issue from time to time, largely “because some people are a bit naive and believe that it is the way to progress.”
He went on to say that he believed it was important to draw a distinction “between what pastoral care is for people who have a different sexual orientation and what gender ideology is … they are two different things.”
The problem, he said, was that advocates of gender ideology were blurring the lines between the sexes — a move that he worried was a step down the road to erasing humanity.
They “do not distinguish what is respect for sexual diversity or diverse sexual preferences from what is already an anthropology of gender, which is extremely dangerous because it eliminates differences, and that erases humanity, the richness of humanity, both personal, cultural, and social, the diversities and the tensions between differences,” he said.
Gary P Hernal started college at UP Diliman and received his BA in Economics from San Sebastian College, Manila, and Masters in Information Systems Management from Keller Graduate School of Management of DeVry University in Oak Brook, IL. He has 25 years of copy editing and management experience at Thomson West, a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters.
