Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Our Lord promised Simon Peter in today's Gospel to make him a fisher of men, that Peter would go out and preach the Gospel and win many souls for the Lord, which is also part of our mission as well.
Our mission includes combating lies and false teachings, which many men and women get ensnared in, too.
So with that in mind, we're continuing our catechesis today on sexuality and gender theory, looking specifically at the errors of gender theory today, philosophical and theological errors, briefly.
Gender theory is an ideology, it's an ideology, it's kind of like a philosophical Medusa.
You know the image of Medusa from Greek mythology, right?
It's the feminine head, so it comes from feminism, and it's a head with many venomous snakes as well.
Among the philosophical snakes or errors that you'll find in gender theory are atheism and nihilism, one follows the other like night and day, they go together perfectly, atheism, nihilism.
There's also existentialism and postmodernism, I think of those as Cinderella's two wicked stepsisters.
Other philosophical errors include radical subjectivism, intersectionalism, Gnostic dualism, because at the heart of it, in many ways, gender theory is just a redressing of Gnosticism, believe it or not.
There's also relativism, nominalism, voluntarism, Marxism, idealism, utilitarianism, hedonism, those are just the snakes that I could count on the head of the Medusa.
All these philosophies, all these worldviews are false, false in various ways, and they're all mixed together in the gender cauldron.
So if you're drinking from this cauldron, if you're buying into gender theory, you're spiritually drinking poison, really.
Pope Benedict XVI in a 2011 address called the Gender Theory an Anthropology Opposed to Faith and to Right Reason, he said, so he said it's both theologically, according to faith, and philosophically, according to right reason, it's faults, it's a lie.
And we know who the father of lies is, and don't think that Pope Francis has been soft on this one, actually, he's spoken very critically of gender theory in his exhortations, in his audiences as well.
As Catholics, we believe what it says in Genesis 1:27, we believe that God created us male and female.
Gender ideology denies creation and the creator, we affirm both.
The Vatican II document, Gaudium et Spes, puts it well at number 36 when it says, quote, when God is forgotten, the creature itself grows unintelligible, unquote.
Gender theory denies God, put him on the back shelf, or just throw him out the pantry, if you want to think of it that way, and humanity disappears with him.
We become unintelligible, we essentially fade away, just like in the movie Back to the Future, how the figure of Marty McFly and his family photo begins to fade away when it seems like his parents will never marry.
Gender theory does that in its own way.
It cancels everyone's identity, it erases really who we are.
We say that the society does not assign sex at birth.
The doctors and the nurses or the midwife, the parents, those who are in tune with reality declare what the baby's sex is by looking at the baby and identifying it, it's a boy or it's a girl.
There's a givenness to reality that needs to be affirmed and embraced and accepted if you want to live in reality.
Gender ideology says that reality is just constructed by society and culture.
We deny that.
We say reality exists objectively, outside of my own subjective thinking and feeling.
We say that an egg is an egg, a dog is a dog, a person is a person, a man is a man, a woman is a woman, a man is male, a woman is female.
Individual created beings have essences and we can know what those essences are.
So I don't stand on the sidewalk and see a bus coming down the street and say to myself, society says that's a bus, but that's just a social construct.
To me it's just a big moving banana.
Bananas don't hurt anyone, right?
So I confidently walk out in the middle of the street right in front of that moving banana.
No, that really is a bus.
I know it, you know it, if you don't know it, you'll find out when it runs over you.
Reality is inescapable.
Other ideology denies reality in terms of a person's sexuality, but they don't necessarily deny reality in all the other spheres of life, I don't know if you've noticed that.
It's because sex and pleasure are the two principal gods of this movement and they want to have complete control over their gods, which is actually impossible.
John De Silva Finley, in his book on sexual identity, writes that in our culture, quote, a woman is to be celebrated, but no one knows what a woman is.
A man is suspect in being masculine, but not if his masculinity defeats women in a sporting event while he identifies as one of them.
Lived incoherence brings a kind of human demise.
As one philosopher puts it, being untruthful is not just a way of failing at being human, it's the way, since in it we undermine the rationality that defines us.
Then he adds this, he says, we act as if we know what things are, but we cannot define them because doing so would deny another's right to define himself however he wishes.
In such a state, nothing public or common can be asserted as true, unquote.
So there's no shared reality with people anymore, why?
Because so many people have embraced not only the lie of gender ideology, but also many of the other false beliefs from the false philosophies that we've mentioned before.
That's why there's no shared reality, no shared common experience anymore.
Scientifically, we know that human beings are either male or female.
We know this, first of all, because we can see the difference between the two.
Statistically speaking, sex is readily recognized at birth in 99.98% of human beings.
We have eyes, we can see these things.
But sex can be determined also scientifically in such fields as genetics, endocrinology, neurology.
From the point of view of genetics, male cells, which contain XY chromosomes, differ from the very moment of conception from female cells with their XX chromosomes.
As Abigail Favale in her book writes, the vast majority of individuals categorized as intersex are unambiguously male and female, even if the presentation of maleness or femaleness is atypical in some way.
And that's the only time that medical professionals should be making therapeutic interventions in those atypical 0.02% of the cases, when they need to help clarify or establish a person's constitutive identity on the basis of objective parameters, not subjective feeling.
Instead, gender ideology promotes self-harm and self-mutilation as self-help.
It promotes harmful medical intervention on healthy bodies, inversing the millennia-old medical creed which says, first, do no harm.
Gender ideology says, no, first, harm, it's the first thing you should do.
Catholics also affirm that the human person is a composite of body and soul, that the body is an integral part of who you are, that the body expresses and communicates the identity of who you are as a person, as an individual.
Gender ideology denies this.
They believe that the human person is just your mind and your will, the body is no inherent meaning for them.
We believe that human beings have a shared nature, we have a shared essence, which is what makes us human, which is what we have in common with other people.
I have a human nature, and my nature corresponds to that of other human beings, and it's what makes me, as an individual, human.
Gender ideology actually denies this, either by affirming what's called moderate nominalism, which says that universal concepts are only an organizing construct that exists in our mind.
So we say human nature, but there really is no shared human nature.
It's just a word we use to classify things, which seem to be similar to us, but really aren't that.
Gender ideology affirms that, or they affirm what's called radical nominalism, which says that reality is utterly individual, so there's no correspondence between language and reality.
I don't share a human nature in common with you, because there's no such thing as a human nature.
We're just individuals, reality's just purely subjective.
Gender ideology says that language is just a power play, as we mentioned in a previous reflection, that the words we use don't correspond to truth, but they're just our way of exercising control and power over others.
Actually believe them when they say that, because that's what they're doing to you.
Exercising control and power over you through manipulation of words, pronouns, legislation.
As Catholics we affirm that truth exists and that you can actually know it, that truth is that which corresponds to reality, that our words and concepts do correspond to how reality really is.
We affirm that God is truth, that Jesus Christ is himself the truth, with a capital T. Gender ideology denies that truth exists, or that they deny at least the knowability of the truth.
They say that, but they don't really believe that actually, otherwise they wouldn't be imposing and forcing their understanding of reality and of truth upon everyone else, which is what they're doing.
Gender ideology believes men and women are interchangeable, that their biological differences must be overcome or ignored or suppressed or destroyed or cancelled.
They rebel against nature, they refuse to acknowledge it, refuse to submit to it, refuse to live by it.
Nature itself is oppressive for them because it limits their desire for freedom without boundaries.
We affirm our human nature, we accept and embrace it, we see it as a gift from God, gift of which we have to be good stewards.
We understand that our human nature has fallen through sin, and it's only through grace and through our cooperation with grace that human nature is restored to wholeness.
Gender ideology denies the reality of sin as an offense against God, and they believe that wholeness can come only through technical manipulation of matter.
And even their concept of wholeness is totally alien to ours.
Wholeness for them is unfettered freedom, total control, all rights, no responsibilities.
We believe that we find our completeness and our wholeness in embracing God's revelation and in relationship to him and to others.
Men and women are literally made for each other.
We knew that before intellectuals told us differently.
Men and women are created and they're called to participate in creation through procreation, through the family, which is an ever so small symbol of the life and the love and the fecundity of the Blessed Trinity.
Men and women are made for each other and we are made for God.
We're created to be open to others and open to our Creator as well.
Life is sacred, the human person is sacred, and their sexuality is sacred as well.
Just as a human person is not meant to be profaned and manipulated and violated and instrumentalized for sexual gratification, so too your sexuality is not meant to be profaned, manipulated, violated, instrumentalized.
The gender-slash-LGBTQ movement is all about profaning what God has created and has said is sacred, so it must be opposed for that.
As for those who do transition or attempt to transition from one sex to another, I think we know that they aren't to be condemned, at least we should know that, right?
We need to pray for them, ask the Lord to give us wisdom in our dealings with them, too.
A lot of times they're very broken people.
They're the unfortunate victims, essentially the unfortunate victims of sacrifice offered up on this new altar of Baal nowadays.
Father Carlo Carafa, first president of the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family, wrote in 1984 to Sister Lucia, one of the visionaries of Fatima, he wrote asking for prayers for his institute, for the institute that was started.
Sister Lucia wrote back to him in her letter, she said this, she said, Father, a time will come when the decisive battle between the kingdom of Christ and Satan will be over marriage and the family, and those who will work for the good of the family will experience persecution and tribulation, but do not be afraid because Our Lady has already crushed his head, she wrote.
So in saying no to gender ideology, we're fighting for the kingdom of Christ.
It's a fight worth fighting for.
The results are in Our Lord's hands.
Let's ask Our Lady to guide and to protect us in this all-important fight.
Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.