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Pope Francis vs. Gender Ideology

August 13, 2016

In the end, reality always wins. An old saying has it that: God always forgives; man sometimes; Na
Robert R. Reilly

Pope Francis sits next Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki, president of the Polish bishops conference, during a meeting with Poland's bishops

In Krakow with the Polish bishops two weeks ago, Pope Francis declared that, We are experiencin
image of God. He specifically included within this defacement [the ideology of] gender. He w
children! are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sexAnd this terrible!

Then he quoted Benedict XVI, who had said to him recently: Holiness, this is the age of sin again
He is very perceptive. God created man and woman; God created the world in a certain way an

Pope Francis is right to use the word ideology to define this exact opposite. The whole point o
not to understand things, but to change them. A second or false reality is set up parallel to reality, w
stage, the destruction becomes literal, as was seen in the Gnostic Nazi and Communist enterprises
in order to institute the faux realities of a race-based theory of history or a class-based theory of his

The entire LGBT movement is similarly ideological as a gender-based theory of history, if evident
has cost the lives of scores of thousands of homosexuals and others due to HIV-AIDS and other ph
Aside from disease and death, how does the gay movement express the unreality of the exact op

Consider what happens in an actively sexual homosexual relationship, in which sodomy is generall
man as if that other man were a woman. The other man willingly pretends that he is a woman. For
least, the antithesis of maleness. It is its denial. He is pretending to be a girl; he forsakes his mascu
shameful in this. They are being less than men; they are being traitors to their sex. This is equally t
of sodomy since he is also pretending the other man is a woman. The Supreme Court and the Obam
with them and accept the exact opposite as equivalent to, if not better than, the thing of which it
relations.

With transgenderism, the play-acting, the pretend element, is sometimes taken a major step beyond
transformation of the male into a female, or the female into a male. Just when one thinks the deform
a new level of deformity is enacted with the surgical mutilation of what God created [as] man and
there is really no end to the absurdity it produces. For instance, a New York City Health Departme
certificates asks the woman giving birth if she is male or female.

We are told that one discovers that one is transgender just like one discovers that one is gay.
psychological disorders to which many so-called transgenders and homosexuals are subject throug
recognizing them as disorders, and then therefore accepting them as normative behavior that shoul
discover that one is an adulterer, a thief or a drunkard? As a priest friend recently said to me, a te
identity in order to rationalize the behavior occasioned by the un-resisted temptation. Steal often en
Habitually practice sodomy and your identity solidifies as homosexual. (I wrote a whole book on
Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything.)

Marianne Duddy-Burke, the executive director of DignityUSA, an inaptly named organization of L

understand the danger that his words can mean for gender-nonconforming people. But the Pope
what nonconformance means and the danger it represents. In Amoris Laetitia, he warned of an i
Creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift, he wrote. At the same time, we are called
first place, accepting it and respecting it as it was created. In other words, conforming oneself to r
oneself to reality is a revolt against it.

The problem, of course, is that gender nonconforming people are simply a small subset of a muc
who do not wish to conform themselves with reality as it exists. Their goal is to put themselves in r
be in relationship to it. They would like themselves to be the cause of reality. They will constitute
as they have the power to do so. Like all human beings, they experience a profound lack within the
want to obtain control and power over those things which they think they lack, so that they can fill
themselves with themselves.

Of course, this does not work. In order to understand why, they would have to restore the role of re
not wish to do. This is what Benedict XVI meant by this as the age of sin against God the Creator
warned of the dire consequences: "When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create
denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God a
is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappear

To find out why this is so, let us go one step deeperin fact, to the foundation of things. St. Thom
intellect, and not the other way around. Nothing could be more important than this statement, thoug
grasp at first. Since God is Logos or Reason itself, St. Thomas said that will follows upon intellec
Whats more, this is why man, made in the image of God, is morally obliged to rule himself by rea
is unreasonable is wrongfor example, physically disfiguring oneself. If on the other hand, the wi
do anythingincluding against his own wordbut so can man. He can will something to be the e
tool to serve his will, then it could be reasonable for a man to cut off his genitals and declare him

One should not get too discouraged by this revolt against being. It will fail. In the end, reality alwa
forgives; man sometimes; Nature never. Those who have been defying Natureincluding the socie
childrenare in for a very harsh lesson.

About the Author

Robert R. Reilly

Robert R. Reilly was Senior Advisor for Information Strategy (2002-2006) for the US Secretary of Defense, aft
was the director of the Voice of America (2001-2002) and served in the White House as a Special Assistant to th
University and the Claremont Graduate University, his books include The Closing of the Muslim Mind, Making G
the Recovery of Modern Music.

Source: http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/4991/pope_francis_vs_gender_ideology.aspx