Catholic Replies
Q. We have a transsexual extraordinary minister of Holy Communion who serves at our children’s Mass. This person came into the Church through RCIA. I wrote to the bishop, but he told me to find another parish if I find this too difficult to watch. I need documentation to show that this is incorrect. Can you help? — K.M., California.
A. We can try, but the promoters of the LGBT movement have so influenced the culture that many people are blind to the truth. First of all, the Church has made clear that persons serving in liturgical ministries, including lay people given the privilege of distributing Holy Communion, must meet certain high standards. Here is a summary of those standards that appeared in the 2004 Vatican document Redemptionis Sacramentum:
“The lay Christian faithful called to give assistance at liturgical celebrations should be well instructed and must be those whose Christian life, morals, and fidelity to the Church’s Magisterium recommend them. It is fitting that such a one should have received a liturgical formation in accordance with his or her age, condition, state of life, and religious culture. No one should be selected whose designation could cause consternation for the faithful” (n. 46).
This statement, not to mention common sense, suggests that a person who believes himself/herself to be a transsexual ought to be disqualified from distributing Holy Communion because their lifestyle contradicts Catholic moral teaching and will cause scandal and consternation among the faithful.
Promoters of transsexualism, or Gender Identity Disorder, or Gender Dysphoria, believe that they can set aside the male or female gender they were born with and identify themselves as the opposite sex, even seeking sex-reassignment surgery. This involves removing their genital organs and replacing them with artificially constructed organs that cannot function in the same way as their original organs.
Second, while the Catholic Church views every person, whatever their sexual inclination, as a person loved by God and called to live a chaste life with the help of prayer, the sacraments, and compassionate counseling, the Church opposes sex-change operations because they cause unnecessary mutilation and are always sterilizing and therefore intrinsically evil. Church teaching on transgenderism is based on Gen. 1:27, which says that “God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them.”
The Church’s opposition to sex-change operations can also be inferred from n. 2297 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which says that “except when performed for strictly therapeutic medical reasons, directly intended amputations, mutilations, and sterilizations performed on innocent persons are against the moral law.” It is true that that prohibition comes in a discussion of torture, but its appearance under the headline “Respect for bodily integrity” makes it relevant to our topic.
Third, in an address to the Roman Curia on December 21, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI called it a “profound falsehood” when “people dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.”
He said that “the words of the creation account — ‘male and female he created them’ (Gen. 1:27) — no longer apply. No, what applies now is this: it was not God who created them male and female — hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves. . . . When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker Himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being.”
Fourth, as is so often the case, the Church’s wisdom is validated by modern science. Writing in The Wall Street Journal on June 12, 2014, Dr. Paul McHugh said that sex-reassignment surgery is “biologically impossible” and transgenderism is a mental disorder.
McHugh, who was chief of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins for almost three decades, said that while the Obama administration, Hollywood, and the major media promote transgenderism as normal, these “policymakers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment, and prevention.”
McHugh said that “misguided doctors” and “diversity counselors” engage in what “comes close to child abuse” when they administer “puberty-delaying hormones” to children or offer them advice on how to rebut “arguments against having transgender surgery.” He said that studies show that close to 80 percent of those children will “abandon their confusion and grow naturally into adult life if untreated. ‘Sex change’ is biologically impossible. People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice-versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.”
Whether your pastor will be persuaded by these facts, we don’t know, but you have to bring them to his attention if for no other reason than the presence of this person on the altar in your parish will lead parishioners, perhaps even young ones, to think that it’s all right to go against the plan of the Creator and decide your gender identity yourself.
Q. I know of a lot of good Catholic people, almost all liberal Democrats, who say they are against abortion yet still vote for the politicians who fund Planned Parenthood. I never understood how they think that these evil politicians are doing God’s work. Can you explain their rationale? Can a person be that blind from seeing good and evil? — D.H., Iowa.
A. Calling political promoters of abortion “evil” is a mistake since it presumes to judge the motives of these politicians, which Jesus said that we are not supposed to do. Better to refer to their actions as evil since these actions make possible the continuing barbaric slaughter of millions of innocent, defenseless unborn babies. This atrocity has gone on for decades, and many politicians have gotten away with approval of murder because many people are unaware of the humanity of the unborn child.
However, with the recent release of nearly a dozen videos of Planned Parenthood officials cavalierly discussing methods of aborting babies that will preserve hearts, lungs, livers, etc., for sale to unscrupulous researchers, one would think that no rational or compassionate person could possibly support Planned Parenthood.
Alas, however, when the vote came up in the U.S. House of Representatives recently to defund PP, 240 legislators voted for defunding, while 181 (178 Democrats and three Republicans) voted to continue sending half a billion dollars a year to the abortion giant, which brought in nearly $1.3 billion in 2015 while killing 324,000 babies.
Are these politicians blind to this atrocity? We don’t know how they could be. We do know, though, is that they seem more concerned with toeing the party line and remaining in office than in protecting the lives of the least of our brothers and sisters.
In so doing, they are just following the lead of their man in the White House, who shed tears on January 7 over children who are the victims of gun violence. “Every time I think about those kids, it gets me mad,” said the president. Unfortunately, he will never shed any tears over the millions of kids who are victims of abortion violence, and, in fact, he vetoed the recent law to curb funding for Planned Parenthood.
Obama, you will recall, is not only a fanatical supporter of aborting babies in the womb, but he has even opposed any efforts to save babies who survive abortion. Maybe if babies were killed by guns instead of sharp medical instruments, the president would oppose abortion.
As for those who repeatedly vote to reelect pro-abortion politicians, some don’t have a clue as to the evil that their votes are perpetuating. Other voters surely know what they are doing, but they want to keep legal a practice that some of them, or someone they know, may have used in the past to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy. Voting for a candidate specifically because he favors the grave evil of abortion amounts to formal cooperation with that evil, and that is a grave sin.
These people clearly illustrate the effects of original sin, which has so blinded their intellects and so weakened their wills that they think evil is good. Pray for them that they will repent before their own life comes to an end.
