A Dutch cardinal has asked Pope Francis for a papal encyclical to combat the false anthropology at the heart of the ideology of gender.
Cardinal Willem Eijk, the Archbishop of Utrecht, made the request in Rome during meetings between senior Vatican officials and Dutch bishops who were making their four-yearly ad limina visit.
“I have asked if it would not be good for the pope to issue an encyclical on gender thinking,” the cardinal said at a press conference later.
“Gender theory is being pushed in all kinds of organisations and we as a Church have not said that much about it,” said Cardinal Eijk, according to reports in Dutch newspapers Nederlands Dagblad and Katholiek Nieuwsblad report.
His request was formally lodged with Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the American prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life.
Gender ideology dismisses biological and scientific categories of male and female in favour of an individual constructing a “gender” of their own choosing.
The ideology is convulsing western societies in particular, with record numbers of young people asking for drugs or surgery that will enable them to live in the so-called gender of their choice.
Cardinal Eijk, a former hospital doctor and a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, has previously expressed hopes for an encyclical on gender ideology, but this is likely to be his first request for such a document from the Pope.
In a speech in Oxford in 2016, the cardinal said that a papal encyclical or other magisterial document “might appear to be necessary”.
He said even Catholic parents were beginning to accept that their own children can choose their genders partly because “they don’t hear anything else”.
The Church, he said, now had an “urgent” duty to remind them of the truth of its teaching about the human body.
“Perhaps a document only on this problem might be an urgent question,” Cardinal Eijk said.
“It (gender theory) is spreading and spreading everywhere in the western world and we have to warn people,” he said.
“From the point of moral theology, it’s clear – you are not allowed to change your sex in this way,” he added.
“It is like euthanasia and assisted suicide,” Cardinal Eijk continued. “When people first began to discuss them they were unsure.”
But many people have now become so “acquainted” with such practices they are now deemed “ordinary”.
He said many Catholics were now accepting gender theory “in a very easy way, even parents, because they don’t hear anything else”.
“The mass media is making publicity for it and people are starting to think that it is normal,” said Cardinal Eijk.
“The introduction of sexual reassignment treatment and surgery, apart from other factors, stimulates the development of gender theory,” the cardinal said in a lecture for the Anscombe Centre at Blackfriars entitled “Is Medicine Losing Its Way?”
“These techniques once available… change the character of health care but also change our culture,” he said.
“The capacity to procreate, resulting in a direct sense from the biological reproductive organs, is intrinsically anchored in the human person because the body is an intrinsic dimension of the person, which constitutes him together with his substantial form, the soul.
“For this reason sexual reassignment implies a violation of the intrinsic value of the body, of the human person itself.”
He argued that “medicine should maintain its therapeutic character”.
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