On December 15 of last year, the letter “Created Male and Female” was published on the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).
Signers included Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, who chairs the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth; Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Chair of the Bishops’ Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage; Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, Chair of the Bishops’ Committee for Religious Liberty; and Bishop Joseph Bambera of Scranton, who chairs the Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.
Other signers included religious leaders from Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, Baptist, and Muslim backgrounds.
The religious leaders stressed that male and female are God-given differences that must be publicly acknowledged, and that those who are confused about their own identity deserve authentic support.
They voiced the belief that “God created each person male or female; therefore, sexual difference is not an accident or a flaw – it is a gift from God that helps draw us closer to each other and to God. What God has created is good.” They cited the Book of Genesis on the creation of humankind: “male and female he created them.”
The letter said the movement to enforce the idea that a man can become a woman or a woman can become a man is “deeply troubling.”
They voiced concern that children are affected by current trends in sexual identity and are harmed when told they can change their sex or are given hormones that can affect their development or render them infertile.
Desires to be identified as the opposite sex are “a complicated reality that needs to be addressed with sensitivity and truth” and with a response of “compassion, mercy and honesty,” the letter stated.
Almost immediately, New Ways Ministry’s Executive Director, Francis DeBernardo, encouraged his group’s supporters to write the four bishops who signed the recent letter. Claiming gender transition helps people “become closer to God,” he said the letter is “denying transgender experience” and “promotes a false scenario about how gender topics are being taught to children.”
This is not the first time that New Ways Ministry has contested official Church teaching.
The advocacy group has faced correction from leading U.S. bishops in the past, including a March, 2011 statement from Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington. A February 2010 statement from Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, then-President of the USCCB, said the group’s claim to be Catholic “only confuses the faithful regarding the authentic teaching and ministry of the Church with respect to persons with a homosexual inclination.”
In 1999, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by the future Pope Benedict XVI, said New Ways Ministry’s founders took an approach to homosexuality that had “ambiguities and errors” which cause confusion among Catholics and harm the community of the Church.
The immediacy and shrillness of New Ways Ministry’s response to the letter should put all Bishops on alert that the effort to proclaim official Catholic teaching regarding the sanctity of human sexual identity will be met with fierce resistance by LGBT lobby.
Let us pray that the Bishops will persevere in their effort to combat the false narrative of such agenda-driven groups and speak the truth, honestly and lovingly to all.
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