In a recent interview, Pope Francis criticized what he called “one of the most harmful intellectual colonies” in public discourse today: excessive gender ideology.
In an interview with writer Elisabetta Piqué that came out on March 10 in the Argentine daily newspaper La Nación, Francis spoke out against the dangers of gender ideology. He said that it blurs the differences between men and women and devalues both men and women.
Francis warned that gender dogma is one of the most dangerous ways that ideas take over. When asked, “Why is it dangerous? Especially, it makes it hard to tell the difference between what men and women value. The fact that people have different ideas is part of what makes us human. It’s getting used to situations where you and someone else have different priorities. The gender dilemma makes us less unique and makes the world dull for everyone, which is the exact opposite of what we’re supposed to be doing as humans.
He didn’t want to write a book about it, but he felt like he had to talk about it sometimes because “some people are a little bit stupid and think that’s the way to get ahead,” as the Pope put it.
To be clear, he made a difference between “pastoral care for people with different sexual orientations” and “what gender ideology is.”
He said that people who support gender ideology were to blame for the rise of gender nonconformity, which was the start of the end of humanity.
“They can’t tell the difference between respect for sexual diversity and different sexual preferences and an anthropology of gender,” he said. “This is very dangerous because it gets rid of differences, and that gets rid of humanity, the richness of humanity, both personally and culturally.”
Pope Francis says that we are headed toward “a future in which divisions are disappearing and everything is the same, everything is uniform, and there is a single leader of the whole globe.” Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson wrote “Lord of the World” in 1907.