You Don’t Have To Be German… To Defy Humanae Vitae

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

As dissident voices in the fringes of the Church become more vocal, some welcome responses have emerged in defense of the fundamental truths of the Faith regarding marriage, the family, and children.

“Synodality” has been a big thing for a while, and three years ago we reported on the “summary” of suggestions heard at “synodal” meetings held throughout the country. On prominent passage of that document expressed the “hope for a welcoming Church,” one that would “desire to accompany, with authenticity,…our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters.”

George Cardinal Mueller, the former head of the Vatican Congregation for the Faith, would have nothing of it. In an interview on EWTN, he rejected the notion outright:

“The aim of this ideology…was to instrumentalize [the] Catholic Church on the face, for promoting their own ideas…this occupation of the Catholic Church is a hostile takeover of the Church of Jesus Christ. If they succeed, it will be the end of the Catholic Church.”

Seldom have so many truths been expressed in so few words.

The USCCB sent that summary on to Rome, apparently without comment, but one brave American bishop realized that Cardinal Mueller’s point needed to be resonated. In August 2021, Arlington Bishop Michael Burbidge released “A Catechesis on the Human Person and Gender Ideology,” a timely and unapologetic document carefully and charitably addressing the “serious challenge for all members of the Church.”

The Catechesis makes no apologies: This false teaching “presents a view of the human person contrary to the truth,” Bishop Burbidge writes. He draws on Pope Francis’ 2017 insight:

“Let us not play with truths. It’s true that behind all this we find gender ideology. In books, kids learn that it’s possible to change one’s sex. Could gender, to be a woman or to be a man, be an option and not a fact of nature? This leads to this error. Let us call things by their names.”

Confucius comes to mind: The first priority for a collapsed society struggling to restore order, he said, is to “call things by their proper names.”

And Bishop Burbidge’s Catechesis makes clear that the “gender” movement is indeed an ideology — an alternate religion with its own metaphysics and a mandatory mission to eliminate truth and replace it — by force, if necessary.

Gender ideology thus rejects, then denies, and ultimately destroys the fundamental realities regarding the human person, the family, and society, all with the intention to create a “Second Reality” (as Robert Musil described the psychosis a century ago).

This ideological enterprise is serious. It is not a mere ephemeral whim of a few victims of mental illness. It constitutes a coherent and, to date, widely tolerated and unchallenged facet in the Culture of Death’s campaign to annihilate God’s command to Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28).

Gender ideology demands the unanimous consent of society, its members and its institutions, to a bill of particulars including that down is up, that boys can be girls or any one of dozens of other beings, and a host of other consequences that follow logically from the fundamental act of faith in the false gods.

A Promising Response: Will It Continue?

When Bishop Burbidge’s “Catechesis” appeared, we suggested that the USCCB simply adopt this document as its own and distribute it nationally. After all, it offers a welcome voice of clarity and truth in a critical time. It calmly confronts the efforts of the Culture of Death to redefine both reality and morality regarding God’s creation of man, “male and female He created them.” (Gen. 5:2).

For whatever reason(s), that embrace did not come to pass. However, with the “gender” problem increasing exponentially and at times violently, this year the Conference’s Committee on Doctrine decided to address at least one central and destructive target in Gender Ideology’s conquest of the public culture: the medical community — speaking broadly and including the fields of technology, human behavior, psychology, education, and even politics — and the gender ideologues’ celebration of destructive and permanent medical manipulation of the body to conform to one’s newly adopted sexual fantasy.

The USCCB committee’s Doctrinal Note on the Moral Limits to Technological Manipulation of the Human Body has a simple purpose: to address the errors contained in what Pope Francis has called an ideology that promotes “a personal identity and emotional intimacy radically separated from the biological difference between male and female.”

The Pope recently told an Argentine journalist that “gender ideology, today, is one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations. Why is it dangerous? Because it blurs differences and the value of men and women,” he added.

Those errors have infected the secular culture on every side. When they are put into practice, the harm they cause mutilates the human body and perverts the human psyche in the name of “transsexuality” and “gender identity.” The impact of these errors on society, the culture, and the family is unfathomably profound.

The Doctrinal Note first presents a helpful and accessible study of what we might call “Catholic anthropology” — the proper understanding of the human person in the light of the Faith and its consequences with regard to the responsible and irresponsible use of science, technology, and medicine.

It is practitioners in those fields that too often convert Gender Ideology’s “I can be whoever I want to be” into a new version of the Hippocratic Oath: “We can do whatever we feel like doing.”

Ideas Have Consequences — Richard Weaver

And bad ideas have very bad consequences.

Fifty-five years ago, Pope St. Paul VI gifted the Church and the world she serves with a combat weapon of truth to use in our constant battle against Satan. Humanae Vitae was not only a fountain of truth but a prophetic document — as its widespread rejection, even among generations of prelates, has proven.

That rejection continues today as the German “Synodal Way” bishops vote to allow blessings for same-sex couples in clear defiance of the promises they made when consecrated to fulfill their solemn duty “teach and encourage with wholesome doctrine and withstand and correct those who contradict it.”

As this unfaithful farce slithers its slimy path towards Our Lady’s heel, two prelates who served in senior Vatican positions have stepped forward to respond with a clarity that is all too rare in our current discourse.

Cardinal Mueller, once again, was blunt when he went public on several occasions.

The German Synodal Way, he said “is worse than schism,” a variant of “materialistic and nihilistic woke culture” that has abandoned “the very essence of Christianity,” LifeSite News reports.

“If they are acting or going absolutely, directly against the Catholic doctrine, the definitions of the dogma, of the Catholic doctrine, there must be a trial, and they must be sentenced, and they must be removed from their office, if they are not converting themselves and they are not accepting the Catholic doctrine,” he told EWTN.

On the same program, Raymond Cardinal Burke, the former head of the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican’s highest court, called the errors “human inventions, human ideologies that are being pushed and the Church is being used,” Burke added.

Clearly the secular culture — which truly embodies a death wish — champions these “human inventions” that challenge God’s creative purpose.

But what insiders are allowing the Church to be used to advance “Gender Ideology”?

“Remember, most heretics in history were bishops,” my favorite theologian told me fifty years ago.