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 <em>Nederlands Dagblad</em> and <em>Katholiek Nieuwsblad</em> 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.
As it emerged into the mainstream, <a href="http://PARIS (CNS) — The retired archbishop of Strasbourg, France, admitted making “inappropriate gestures” to an adult woman when he was a Franciscan priest in the 1980s. Archbishop Jean-Pierre Grallet issued a public statement Nov. 15. He said both a criminal investigation and canonical investigation were underway and that he would withdraw from speaking publicly during the investigations. He also said that, earlier this year, when he learned the woman had come forward, he apologized to her and sought forgiveness from her and her family. In a separate statement, Archbishop Luc Ravel of Strasbourg said the abuse dates back to the fall of 1985, and he learned of the allegations from the victim last December. He said that in January, he reported the case to the Strasbourg public prosecutor; he also notified Vatican authorities. He said civil and canonical inquiries were ongoing. Archbishop Ravel repeated his compassion for the victim and her family and added, “I share the shock and sorrow of all the priests and faithful of the diocese, in particular those who may have known Archbishop Jean-Pierre Grallet or worked with him.” During a news conference Nov. 7, Archbishop Eric de Moulins-Beaufort of Reims, president of the bishops’ conference, said 11 bishops or former bishops are being or have been investigated by church or judicial authorities for abuse. At the time, he was reading a statement from French Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, former head of the French bishops’ conference, who admitted to abusing a 14-year-old girl 35 years ago. The French bishops were forced to look more closely at their handling of abuse and allegations after mid-October revelations that retired Bishop Michel Santier of Créteil, who announced in 2021 that he was retiring for health reasons, had been credibly accused of sexual misconduct and disciplined by the Vatican. In early December 2021, Archbishop Michel Aupetit of Paris resigned after public accusations of bad management and an improper — or at least “ambiguous” — relationship with a woman. Pope Francis had told reporters during an inflight news conference a few days later that nothing had been proven about Archbishop Aupetit’s behavior, but the “gossip” surrounding the case had made it impossible for him to continue running the archdiocese.">the phenomenon was explicitly condemned by Pope Benedict XVI in his address to the Roman Curia of December 2012, </a>shortly before he relinquished his petrine ministry.
<a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html">Pope Francis later implicitly criticised gender theory in paragraph 155 of Laudato Si, his 2015 papal encyclical on the environment,</a> and has linked the ideology to his warnings to the world of a “global war on the family”.
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”.
