Rome Newsroom, Mar 1, 2024 / 10:00 am (CNA).
Pope Francis on Friday morning gave an address on the importance of building a culture that protects human and Christians vocations, things he suggested were at risk due to contemporary cultural challenges including gender ideology.
“It is very important that there is this meeting, this meeting between men and women, because today the ugliest danger is gender ideology, which cancels out differences,” the pope said during an audience with members of the French-based academic organization Research and Anthropology of Vocations Institute (CRAV).
Gender ideology, which seeks to blur differences between men and women through movements such as transgenderism, “makes everything the same,” Francis said.
“Erasing differences is erasing humanity. Man and woman, however, are in a fruitful ‘tension,’” Francis told the assembly, which is gathered in Rome for a two-day international conference titled “Man, Woman, Image of God: For an Anthropology of Vocations.”
The pope did not read the full address, instead delegating the task to Monsignor Filippo Ciampanelli. “I still have a cold and it’s tiring to read for a while,” the pope said to the participants assembled at the Vatican.
Focusing the Friday morning address on the “anthropological crisis and the necessary promotion of human and Christian vocations,” Pope Francis said this task is challenged by myriad social challenges arising from the cultural zeitgeist, including gender ideology.
Highlighting the anthropological angle of the conference, the pope pointed to “an elementary and fundamental truth, which today we need to rediscover in all its beauty: The life of the human being is a vocation.”
The pope emphasized that this is a foundational element “which underlies every call within the community” and “has to do with an essential characteristic of the human being as such.”
“This discovery,” the pope added, “brings us out of the isolation of a self-referential ego and makes us look at ourselves as an identity in relation.”
The Holy Father emphasized that it is imperative to understand this “anthropological truth,” as it “fully responds to the desire for human fulfillment and happiness that lives in our hearts.”
“We sometimes tend to forget or obscure this reality,” the pope said, which carries the risk of “reducing the human being to his sole material needs or primary needs, as if he were an object without conscience and without will, simply dragged by life as part of a mechanical gear.”
To counteract this trend, the pope stressed that there needs to be a broad recondition that “the life of the human being is a vocation” and that “man and woman are created by God and are the image of the Creator.”
The pope buttressed this remark by highlighting that human beings must cultivate a relationship with “he who generated me, to the reality that transcends me, to others and to the world around me,” as a way to express the universal call we each face “to embrace a specific and personal mission with joy and responsibility.”
The conference includes 15 different sessions and will run from March 1–2. It features a line of speakers, including Cardinal Marc Ouellet, who will evaluate the subjects of the conference through a pastoral lens as well through a study of philosophical and theological anthropology.
Participants will attend Mass on Friday and Saturday, celebrated by Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost and Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, respectively.
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Is this the same Pope who gave the green light for transgender Godparents and who seems to indicate that the disorder is just one amongst many? He needs to get his story straight, in the real world, ordinary Catholics and others are desperate for moral guidance and support, but the main Christian churches seem obsessed with falling in line with secular government.
Yes, in the real world. ordinary Catholics and others are desperate for support. For guidance, though — on this issue? There are indeed some thorny moral issues, but there are others for which “I didn’t know” is simply not a plausible excuse. I think it is genuinely possible for someone not to recognize that a child at the embryonic stage of development really is a human person, but I cannot accept that excuse for partial-birth abortion, let alone allowing children who survive abortion to die due to intentional neglect. Sometimes the problem is not that evil is not recognized, but that evil is desired; in such case support might be needed for those who oppose evil, but guidance is pointless.
Yep. Same guy. Same one who introduced an Argentinian friend as “she who was he but now is she.”
This guy talks a good game. And every time he turns right around and undoes it all with his decisions, his actions, his off-the-cuff remarks. He has lost all credibility. Don’t even bother reporting his speeches anymore; it’s all a sick game.
Pure cant and utter hypocrisy from a figure known universally as a man who says one thing in his words while he does the opposite in his actions. He receives transsexual prostitutes regularly in monthly luncheons, supports them financially, and never even remotely attempts their repentance and conversion. For almost 11 years he has surrounded himself with a cabal of grotesque homosexuals in the Vatican and has gone to extraordinary lengths to protect extreme homosexual predators like his favorites Rupnick and Zancetta from canonical and even secular criminal penalties.
The manifestation of God’s love in paradise is going to be Male-Female love, and anyone living in this world fails to conclude so is unlikely to gain everlasting life! There is no marriage (as there is no need of raising children) nor sexless lives, but both males and females are like angels and effectively (material)bodies of invisible and essenceless God, true Advaitha.
The Holy Family of Nazareth is an inspiration for all times. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph – Pray for us.
It’s the very gender ideology that even suggests that the sexual relationship of two men can be blessed. This Vatican creates confusion at every turn. The value of the Petrine ministry as a visible sign that the Church is One (i.e. a unifying sign) is lost on this pontiff. Even using the term “pontiff” to describe Francis is risable since the word pontiff comes from the root word meaning bridge. If anything, this Pope has been blowing up bridges since the day he was elected.
I’m just glad he didn’t say that the ugliest danger is Tradionalist Catholics.
He might not say it, but that seems to be what he thinks.
Today the greatest danger is mealymouthed Modernism that whipsaws the faithful with a Peronist form of weaponized ambiguity.
We read: “…the ugliest danger is gender ideology, which cancels out differences.”
The papal message throughout the article is sound and worthy of respect. And, yet, might the second-ugliest danger be the elevation of differences–as in some aspects of a tensely “polyhedral” and synodal Church?
Instead, how, both, to affirm things concrete (like personal “vocations”), but without appearing to discount the meaning of the “concrete universal” in the historical and incarnate Jesus Christ, as reflected in moral absolutes (Veritatis Splendor)?
How to affirm the existential “conscience” and “will,” but without seeming to omit the more traditional and informative “intellect” (Augustine: Man as memory, intellect and will)?
How to leaven an unfolding future at risk of ideological forwardism, but without demeaning or evading, and never formally contradicting the “backwarist’s” memory and Magisterium?
How to not only maintain the “tension” between man and woman, but affirm the larger and whole unity of “complementarity”? Analogous to the “hermeneutics of continuity” versus discontinuity?
___________________________________________
So, about the dangerous ideology of fluid “gender theory,” and the seeming carve-out of concrete “couples” (Fiducia Supplicans?)….And with Hamlet: “To truly bless the complementary, or to facsimile-bless the irregularly coupled, that is the question.”
No. Trafficking baby immigrants from their mother’s wombs to demonic, barbaric deaths, [before, during or after birth] or in and from the cryogenic wombs, or then, keeping them as cryogenic abandoned orphans for so much time and then killing unjustly…and others….and for money and power!!! These are worse, in kind and in degree.
Who was worse, Hitler, Himmler, or Mengele? Personally, I’m inclined to say Mengele, but (a) it’s really hard to say, and (b) it doesn’t matter at all. Beyond a certain level of nastiness, it’s best not to think about too much. And so it is with the two types of behavior you’re comparing.
They can be isolated and disparaged, but how do we draw them to Christ and his message? One failed Methodology…
Michelle Bachmann and her husband Marcus ran a “clinic” in Minnesota entitled “Pray the Gay away”. It was closed for engaging in a discredited therapy designed to convert gays to straights through prayer and self-reflection and not keeping “patient” records. It appears that lack of documentation includes successes.
Are our prayers unanswered since they continue the “out of the closet in your face” attitude? Am a fortunate father for not having a Gay child? I see no mention of parental guidance
Pray for God’s help.
From the very beginning of his papacy the overwhelming focus of Pope Francis has been on seeking Our Lord’s Mercy. This was the reason for declaring the year of mercy. (You protestants out there have you ever kicked off a truly global revival for an entire year? LOL) Everything is spelled out in the book “The Name Of God Is Mercy” in which Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli has long conversations with Pope Francis who explains it all. He NEVER endorses any kind of sin but teaches that there is deliverance even for those so buried in it that they have despaired of ever escaping. There is no confusion here except for those have some confusion originating in some of the storm of conflicting worldly outlooks which the pope has loosely termed ideology.
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Mt 7:21).
“Everyone, everyone,” an ideology?
I beg your pardon, but has Pope Francis ever kicked off a truly global revival (LOL)? Oh, he can give a year a name, just the same as Congress can declare May 10 National Liver and Onions Day — but I would need evidence to believe that the pope’s declaration prompted an ACTUAL revival or to believe that the congressional declaration ACTUALLY increased the consumption of liver and onions.
Concerning the last comments by Ouris and Peter Beaulieu Their contradictions are obvious. If you were a catholic regularly attending mass during the year of mercy and following catholic media you would certainly have known what the focus of the Universal Church was. If you are not catholic and/or were not attending mass regularly then you would not have a clue and your demand for proof is so much liver and onions. Pope Francis preaches the Mercy of Christ. He preaches that people trapped in life of habitual mortal sin can be delivered and healed by seeking forgiveness of Jesus Who IS love and mercy. Teaching this is doing the will of God if anything ever is. To throw Mt.7:21 around as an insinuation is not doing God’s will. The point of mentioning the book “The Name Of God Is Mercy” is that we can no longer be couch potatoes where the facts are concerned these days. We have to the extent reasonably possible go to the trouble to learn the whole story. There are inexpensive books on Pope Francis teachings. They are inspiring as well as informative so check Amazon. At the beginning of this month I did a search for the popes prayer intention for March. I found six good online sources; these will serve to keep up with his teachings and observations without too much trouble. We as Catholics owe this to the man chosen by the Holy Spirit to be the Vicker of Christ.
This pope protects sexual predators, encourages and supports gay clergy, blesses gay couples, prioritizes a leftist climate agenda over more pressing spiritual concerns, and regularly attacks faithful traditional Catholics. Given his track record, there’s nothing this pope says that any discerning believer needs to take seriously.
Broadbrush! Not all Gays are predators. That very disparagement is a blatant reason why we are failing to “convert” them.
We don’t convert them or anyone else. Repentance and faith are the work of the Holy Spirit alone. Stop defending the indefensible.
Yes, of course, about “not all gays are predators.”
But the gayme-changer was when the predatory faction first sought civil unions by saying this was not a half-way house to full redefinition of “marriage;” immediately followed by the aggressive oxymoron of gay “marriage.” Even the ersatz United State Supreme Court got in the act, so to speak.
A tough ratchet to undo, if the compassionate thing is to “‘convert’ them”, not only them but everyone else for whatever temptations afflict the wider population. Instead, why not simply dilute the drop of cyanide in the punchbowl with spontaneous and informal semi-blessings poured on every kind of “irregular” coupling floating around?
Just move along folks, there’s nothing to see here.
Broadbrush! Athanasius did not claim or even imply that all “Gays are predators.”
Broadbrush! The wrongly alleged disparagement is not a blatant reason why “we are failing to ‘convert’ them.”
On the other hand, failing to properly counsel gays who actively engage in homosexual sex that such is mortally sinful, and that they should repent and do what’s necessary to avoid both the sinning and occasions of such sins demonstrates a lack of love for these people and the fate of their immortal souls.
We read: “[Pope Francis] preaches that people trapped in life of habitual mortal sin can be delivered and healed by seeking forgiveness of Jesus Who IS love and mercy.”
OF COURSE! ABSOLUTELY. But, the divisive ambiguity and (some say) capitulation is something else; it’s the inventive half-blessing of doubled “couples” as such, rather than the undivided and real blessing of “individual people” as such.
Might we finally consider the possibility that no longer being able to even SEE the difference (!) between homosexual/anti-binary actions and complementary/binary intercourse between a man and a woman IS an inflicted or acquired blindness at the very center of the parody (not parity)?
Is even the seeing flattened and displaced by the doing?
Homosexuals who successfully free themselves from the non-seeing (!) describe the “AHA MOMENT” that enabled their “conversion.” They report that this moment of freedom and insight is similar to playing cards, and then discovering that they’ve been playing with two cards stuck together, and have been betting on the wrong card.
They want to get back into the real world. The successful conversion therapist Dr. Nicolosi (RIP) explained this moment—as described NOT by him but by his clients!
But, OF COURSE, his finding and the testimony of his clients are often illegal and even punished by the establishment. Thomas More faced a similar persecution under the establishment of his day: “Some men think the Earth is round, others think it flat; it is a matter capable of question. But if it is flat, will the King’s [the establishment’s!] command make it round? And if it is round, will the King’s command flatten it? No, I will not sign” (Robert Bolt, “A Man for All Seasons,” 1962).
So, WHAT ABOUT the difference between the fully real blessing of struggling (and often victimized) persons as such, versus any pseudo-blessing of irregular “couples” as such?
This pope is the worst in my lifetime. He is political. He is singlehanded ly destroying the Catholic Church. I don’t need to hear him speak about climate change. He doesn’t need to tell America to have open borders. I was furious when he opened the door to gays. If they do not like the Catholic beliefs of a man and a woman, go to another church but leave mine alone. He needs to retire. We need a pope that speaks of helping the poor, respecting marriage between a man and a woman, the sanctity of life. I do not want to hear anything political. I go to church for a break from the real world. I need hope.