Question 4.78

4.78 Are ideological façades and sources of division that important in the Church?

Benedict XVI used to say that ideologies will not save the world but, rather, the saints and their great, gentle insights. Ideologies coarsen, crush, and destroy men, because they are not intrinsically oriented to their advantage. In Guinea, I was personally acquainted with Communism, which was so full of generous promises. On fraudulent pretexts it put many of my compatriots to death. The ideological spirit is the opposite of the Gospel spirit. That is why priests who choose to follow or to propagate political ideas are necessarily on the wrong path, since they make sacred something that is not supposed to be. Ideology is by nature disconnected from reality, and it is necessarily a source of division, since it cannot win the lasting allegiance of people who are still anchored in reality, in good times and bad.

Following Vatican Council II, some tried with all their might to give a political reading to the work of the Council Fathers. That was a serious error. But, alas, that phenomenon was not new. Down through the centuries, the Church has always had to confront ideologies; the heresies themselves were of an ideological nature. There is always a combat between light and darkness, a confrontation between the Church, with her view of man and the world, and political fashions that soon grow dull. John Paul II dared to fight Communism; historians agree in saying that he had a preeminent role in the fall of the Soviet empire.

I am not afraid to say that the Church will always have to confront ideological lies. Today, she must address gender ideology, which John Paul II did not hesitate to describe as a “new ideology of evil”. Moreover gender, the product of reflection by American structuralists, is a deformed child of Marxist thinking. In his last book, Memory and Identity,⁵ John Paul II had already written: “I am thinking. . . of the strong pressure from the European Parliament to recognise homosexual unions as an alternative type of family, with the right to adopt children. It is legitimate and even necessary to ask whether this is not the work of another ideology of evil, more subtle and hidden, perhaps, intent upon exploiting human rights themselves against man and against the family.”

Gender ideology conveys a crude lie, since the reality of the human being as man and woman is denied. The lobbies and the feminist movements promote it with violence. It has rapidly been transformed into a battle against the social order and its values. Its objective does not stop just at the deconstruction of the [human] subject; it is interested above all in the deconstruction of the social order. It is about sowing discord over the legitimacy of social norms and introducing a suspicion over the model of heterosexuality; for [proponents of] gender [theory], it is necessary to abolish Christian civilization and construct a new world.

And so I think of the American sociologist Margaret Sanger, who admittedly engaged in an ongoing struggle for the moral deconstruction of the West. A woman, she said, must be able to control her body and her sexuality. Since she is its owner, she must be able to do as she likes with it, to enjoy the freedom of her body and of its rights, and to manage her life. She must freely choose to be a mother or not. Every child from now on must be “wanted”, “chosen”, “planned”. No religious morality, no dogma, no cultural tradition can prevent women from achieving their goals. No one should prevent or forbid women from having access to contraception and abortion.

In the same way, Simone de Beauvoir, like Jean-Paul Sartre and atheistic existentialism, wanted to liberate the individual from the living conditions that God established. In order to exercise his rights, the individual must be committed to the denial of what exists outside of himself or of what is given by nature and divine revelation. A radical feminist, Simone de Beauvoir asserted: “One is not born a woman, one becomes so.” Hence, if a woman remains passive and submits to traditions, she becomes a “wife” and “mother”. This is what theoreticians of gender studies call the stereotype or the repressive social construct that must be “deconstructed”. Conversely, if a woman is committed to constructing herself in a way that is radically autonomous with respect to others and to God, she “liberates” herself; the woman becomes herself and lives for herself. She can thus own herself and control her destiny.

In December 2012, during his last address on the occasion of Christmas greetings to the Roman Curia, Benedict XVI decided to reflect on Simone de Beauvoir’s statement, “One is not born a woman, one becomes so”: “These words lay the foundation for what is put forward today under the term ‘gender’ as a new philosophy of sexuality. According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society. The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious. 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. According to the biblical creation account, being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God. This very duality as something previously given is what is now disputed. 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. Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will. The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned.”