Pope Francis recently spoke up to directly criticize the recent onset of radical gender ideology as part of a recent interview, making reference to it as “one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations” in the current public discourse.
Francis spoke out on the topic and others alongside journalist Elisabetta Piqué in an interview that was published back on the 10th of March in La Nación, an Argentine daily newspaper — and he expressed that gender ideology was very dangerous because it heavily blurred the lines between the distinctions of male and female, diminishing the established value that each of those things possessed.
“Gender ideology, today, is one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations,” stated Francis. “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 expressed that while he was not currently planning to go out and write anything extensive regarding the topic of gender, he did actually find it necessary to speak on the issue every now and then, mostly “because some people are a bit naive and believe that it is the way to progress.”
He continued on to state that he thinks it is very important to put a hard line of 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 main problem, he explained, was that the advocates of gender ideology were blurring the lines between the distinct sexes — a shift which sparked an extreme level of worry in him that it was a step down the road to the total erasure of 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 explained.
A comparison was made by Pope Francis of the current climate to the world presented in a book by Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson from 1907, “Lord of the World,” — which is a world that is expressed as “a future in which differences are disappearing and everything is the same, everything is uniform, a single leader of the whole world.”
