Pope Engenders Controversy

From the BBC:

Pope Benedict XVI has said that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour is just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction…Pope Benedict XVI warned that gender theory blurs the distinction between male and female and could thus lead to the “self-destruction” of the human race.

Further details are available from the Vatican Information Service:

While highlighting that the Church “cannot and should not limit herself to transmitting just the message of salvation to her faithful”, the Holy Father said that it must also “protect the human being against self-destruction. It is necessary to have something like an ecology of the human being, understood in the proper manner. It is not a surpassed metaphysics when Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman, and demands that this order of creation be respected… That which is often expressed and understood by the term ‘gender’, is definitively resolved in the self-emancipation of the human being from creation and the Creator”.

This is less than a revelation; Ratzinger expressed the same views on gender in his 2004 “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World”:


…This perspective has many consequences. Above all it strengthens the idea that the liberation of women entails criticism of Sacred Scripture, which would be seen as handing on a patriarchal conception of God nourished by an essentially male-dominated culture. Second, this tendency would consider as lacking in importance and relevance the fact that the Son of God assumed human nature in its male form.

No actual texts of gender theory are quoted or discussed; instead, there are ruminations on Biblical texts and citations of other Pontifical documents. The document goes on to extoll women as mothers while also commending virginity:

Although motherhood is a key element of women’s identity, this does not mean that women should be considered from the sole perspective of physical procreation…Virginity refutes any attempt to enclose women in mere biological destiny. Just as virginity receives from physical motherhood the insight that there is no Christian vocation except in the concrete gift of oneself to the other, so physical motherhood receives from virginity an insight into its fundamentally spiritual dimension: it is in not being content only to give physical life that the other truly comes into existence. This means that motherhood can find forms of full realization also where there is no physical procreation.

By “virginity”, Ratzinger is doubtless emphasising the church’s ideal alternative to motherhood, although it should be remembered that nuns (and monks and priests for that matter) do not have to be virgins – St. Mary of Egypt, for example, was an ex-prostitute.

The 2004 document was seen as a mixed bag by feminists. Tina Beattie wrote that

The content of the letter is not antithetical to some feminist arguments, and indeed it reveals how many unacknowledged resonances there are between feminism and Catholic theology. It affirms the inherent relationality of women…which, although couched in essentialist terms that feminists might reject, echoes many of the theories found in feminist writings.


But the whole bias of the letter is implicitly anti-feminist. For a start, it is produced in the name of one exclusively male group…and addressed to another exclusively male group…Its title bears little relation to its content, which says hardly anything about men or about collaboration…Not surprisingly, perhaps, it was widely publicized in the secular press as the Vatican’s hardline reaction to feminism. (1)

Meanwhile, gender theory was also attacked in the recent “First European Catholic-Orthodox Forum’s statement on the family”. Interfax has the document:

We acknowledge the positive international documents that support the family. For instance, art. 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that: “Man and woman of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family” and “the family is the natural and fundamental group of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.” In the past the family and childbirth were regarded as something sacred. In recent years, however, these notions are questioned. There is an attempt to change language and introduce ambiguity into international documents under the ideological introduction of the gender theory.

Implicit here is the idea that supporting gay rights is somehow undermining true human rights. This is an idea that the Russian Orthodox Church – which is more bombastically authoritarian than the Vatican – has been pushing for a while. Ratzinger’s apocalyptic talk of the “self-destruction” of the human race is of a piece with this, and it will doubtless speed along détente with the Orthodox.


(1) Tina Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, p. 20.

8 Responses

  1. I’ve blooged on this also, it really is littel surprise but once again posits religion as anti-human and indeed anti-nature.

  2. Xians of all stripes love to paint any popular violation of their theology as apocalyptic. Gender norms are just the bogeyman of the decade.

    I’m a bit curious as to whether the document quoted above was written in English. I presume that, if it is an exclusively clergical document, it was written in Latin or Italian and later translated into global vernaculars. Benedict XVI speaks and reads a number of languages with great fluency so I wonder if vernacular versions are still the words of the original author.

  3. Benedict XVI is quite right. The proper response to being gay (and I know as I am gay) is to strive for celibacy and chastity.

  4. The proper response to being gay (I too am gay) is embracing what you are without self-judgement.

    Benedict is a religious fascist !

  5. Benedict XVI is not a religious fascist. He is a great man and prophet for our times. He understands the demonic powers that lie behind homosexuality (intertwined with psychological factors as well) and can help all of us homosexuals to attain purity for our souls before God.

    It is the gay lobby that is most dangerous for gay people, because they encourage people to persist in acting out homosexual behaviour (gay sex), that can sometimes lead a soul to be lost to hell upon death.

    Incidentally, the catholic church says that only gay sex is sinful, not the orientation itself.

    It is the devil himself who tempts us homosexuals towards gay sex. Believe me. I have battled against the devil in this area for 31 years. I refuse to let the devil have the possibility of taking my soul to hell for this sin upon my death.

    I repeat again, the gay lobby is a most dangerous group of people, for all homosexuals. It promotes gay sex, at the terrible cost of the possibility of being thrust into hell for this sin upon our death.

    For those of us who trust in God, God ALWAYS finds a way for us out of this trap.

  6. Benedict XVl is one of the greatest friends that us homosexuals have at the moment, because he dares to tell us the truth about and the spiritual dangers of our condition.

  7. I’m straight, and I think any theology that flat-out denigrates a natural consequence of sexual orientation (gay sex between consenting adults) was created to control people, not to help them grow spiritually. As such, it is bogus theology.

    Man, think about it: you worship a deity who made some people gay, gave them a strong sex drive like most other humans, and then declares that gay sex is a sin. How can you worship such a sadistic jerk?

  8. I disagree with the above post from Karen totally.

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