Editor's note: On Feb. 26, Detroit Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron published “The Good News About God’s Plan: A Pastoral Letter on the Challenges of Gender Identity.” Coverage of the letter's release can be found here.
Being Catholic has always meant standing apart from the larger society. Our founder — a member of the Jewish people, a group that was set apart from the larger society of the Roman Empire — suffered and was put to death for his teachings. His disciples, who were entrusted with carrying on his message, were tortured and, when they refused to recant that they had seen Jesus risen from the dead and that he was “Lord and God,” were executed in cruel and perverse ways.
But the Gospel of Jesus Christ continued to spread and his teachings to “love one another as I have loved you” inspired generations of Christians who, in turn, transformed Western civilization. This eventually built up a uniquely Catholic way of seeing the world, which gave birth to, among other things, scientific inquiry (because God made the world, the world was ordered and could be known and studied), a serious commitment to the arts (as our call to imitate the beauty of God’s creation), and a robust development of human rights (as all people enjoy a God-given, inherent dignity that must be respected).
This Christian worldview also developed a uniquely Judeo-Christian understanding of the human person from which these rights flowed. Leaning on the Scriptures of our “big brothers,” we know from the Book of Genesis that human beings are created in “the image and likeness of God” and that we are created “male and female.” This means that each human person reflects God. Regardless of whatever physical or emotional struggles we have, we are each the imago Dei.
But the Christian worldview goes even further: Jesus tells us in the Gospel of John that “God so loved the world that he sent his only Son.” God took on flesh; God became man. This is what we celebrate every Dec. 25. For Christians, the Incarnation is the hinge event of all time. God broke into the world and united himself, irrevocably, to humanity. To profess this reality is to say something profound about who God is, and it says something no less important about who we are. As St. Athanasius taught: “God became man so that man might become God.” Anticipating our divinization, we are given, through baptism, the “down payment of the Holy Spirit,” as St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians.
We can be tempted to think that we only need to consider these truths at Mass on Sunday. But in reality, they have shaped our understanding of the human person for the past two millennia. Catholic education — in schools and in parish-based faith formation structures — is part of the mission of Christ’s disciples so that each generation can be formed by these truths. They shape our minds, which in turn shape our lives. For us, these truths need to permeate our culture’s understanding of the human person, particularly around sexuality. Contrary to what is often proposed, our sexuality is not something extrinsic to who we are. Our maleness or femaleness is not unimportant, nor is our identity or sexuality malleable. Each individual is unique and unrepeatable, created either a man or a woman.
At no other time and in no other place was this truth contested or controversial. Every society and civilization understood this … until now. There are forces at work in our culture that seek to undermine this truth and to propose a counter-reality that we choose our own gender, our own sexuality, or our sexual identity. Some people believe even uttering the immutability of one’s sexuality identity or not using one’s preferred pronouns should be a “hate crime.” Others are offering social, chemical, or surgical means to delay, reverse, or stop puberty among children and adolescents so that they can determine their own sexual identity. A radically different vision of the human person is being proposed today that calls to mind the great tragedies of the pseudo-science movements in the early 20th century such as the “scientific racism” of eugenics, the widespread practice of lobotomizing the mentally ill, or tragic consequences of the sexual experiments of Dr. John Money.
We rightly look back in shame at the harm done to the human person in the name of the “scientific consensus” of the day. But true courage and true discipleship of Jesus does not merely scorn the wrongs of the past. It also speaks out against the assaults against the human person of today. The evils of racism, abortion, and the modern-day slavery of human trafficking are rightly condemned. And we should speak loudly against the false anthropology which promotes gender ideology. This false understanding of the human person undercuts the foundational truths upon which the Gospel is built. And it does great harm to individuals — especially children — and to society at large.
We, as heralds of the Gospel, owe it to our brothers and sisters who struggle with gender confusion to share with them the truth that they need not create an understanding of who they are out of whole cloth. We do not make ourselves, but we are given an identity, including a sexual identity, in our DNA. One does not choose what sex or gender one is any more than one chooses one’s blood type or ancestry. It is not a prison to accept this reality as it is; rather, it is liberating! Realizing that I can confidently move forward as a man, regardless of how I feel on a given day, frees me to build my life on something far more solid than my feelings. If I am shackled by how I feel on a given day, week, or year, I become a prisoner to the whims and changes which inevitably come. And it becomes impossible to build my life on a firm foundation.
Christian anthropology proposes this truth as a means to authentic human freedom. Certainly, this truth is “out of step” with movements in society, even in the medical community, to build upon the sandy foundation of a faulty understanding of the human person. But we were not filled with the Holy Spirit so that we could run and hide while our brothers and sisters are led astray. St. Paul tells a young Timothy: “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather of power and love and self-control.”
As Catholics we are called to confidently proclaim the truths that 1.) the human person is made in God’s image and likeness and 2.) we are united with God for all eternity in the person of Jesus Christ. The human person is not a mistake, nor is one’s sexuality a mistake. We proclaim this truth in our churches, our schools, our health care institutions, and in the public square.
We proclaim it not in bitterness, but in love. Love and truth are mutually supportive. It is not loving nor compassionate to allow someone to be injured because we are afraid to speak the truth. A loving doctor does not shy away from warning his patient who is injuring himself. Nor does a researcher hide a great discovery from the world because her findings might be challenging for some people. Proclaiming the truth about the goodness of one’s sexuality and the evil of gender ideology is our duty, in obedience to the truth and in love for every person in our society.
Fr. Stephen Pullis is director of graduate pastoral formation at Sacred Heart Major Seminary. He formerly served as director of the Archdiocese of Detroit's Department of Evangelization and Missionary Discipleship.
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