CV NEWS FEED // In a new book, Catholic experts offer guidance on how Church leaders can follow Catholic teaching while navigating gender ideology issues.
The book, Gender Ideology and Pastoral Practice: A Handbook for Catholic Clergy, Counselors, and Ministerial Leaders, is intended “to assist Catholics doing pastoral work and ministering to children and families caught up in a destructive ideology.” It is based on the questions heard most often in the authors’ work with dioceses, parishes, and families.
According to the book’s website, authors address such topics as: What is a gender transition? What does the Church teach on this issue? How should we respond when a school child tells us he or she is non-binary? What is the appropriate way for the Church to help and support families when their children say they are transgender? How do we navigate sacraments and pastoral care? How did we get here?
One contributing author is Dr. Jane Adolphe, Professor of Law at Ave Maria School of Law in Naples, Florida, and Adjunct Professor of the University of Notre Dame, School of Law, in Sydney. She holds degrees in common law, civil law, and canon law (B.C.L./LL.B, J.C.L./J.C.D.) from McGill University and the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, in Rome, Italy. Adolphe has worked as a legal advisor to the Holy See. She writes in the area of international law, human rights, and the Holy See.
Adolphe explained via email to CatholicVote that the book is the third in a trilogy that “addresses Catholic sexual morality grounded in the natural law, Sacred Scripture, tradition and the Magisterium, and its truth demonstrated by evidence from the physical and social sciences.”
“Each book is the fruit of an effort by three different interdisciplinary groups of internationally known Catholic scholars, clerics, lay men and women,” Adolphe said.
The first book, Humanae Vitae and Catholic Sexual Morality, is a compilation of essays from a 2022 conference in Rome in which Catholic scholars responded to a Pontifical Academy for Life publication that proposed the possibility of using contraception in some circumstances, contrary to defined Catholic teaching on the matter.
Adolphe explained that this first volume examines such issues as “the meaning of ‘radical paradigm change,’ of intrinsically evil acts, of conscience and discernment.” While discussing “gender ideology, homosexual unions, and transgenderism in relation to Catholic moral theology,” the main focus of the book is on Humanae Vitae and “its definitive and infallible status.”
The second book, Lived Experience and the Search for the Truth: Revisiting Catholic Sexual Morality, is a companion volume to the first.
“It seeks to reach those who have turned away from obvious truths, seemingly frozen in subjective personal experience that has displaced rational argument in discourse, where universal and objective truth cannot find a foothold,” Adolphe said.
Deborah Savage, co-editor of the second volume, explains that the book “attempts to arrive inductively at the truths embedded in the moral teaching of the Church through the lived experience of faithful men and women, rendered intelligible in conceptual terms.”
“It includes personal testimonies of those using their reason to discern out of immoral lifestyles and embrace the truth and beauty of God’s will for them in both faith and reason,” Adolphe told CatholicVote.
The third volume in the series, just published, on Gender Ideology and Pastoral Practice, “considers the consequences of the subjective, emotive era in which we live,” according to Adolphe.
The book “moves from facts about sexual identity to the problem of ideological colonization and the impact of gender ideology, to applicable theological and pastoral principles, with an emphasis on pastoral care for transitioners and detransitioners, as well as impacted families and communities,” Adolphe commented, adding that the book “also considers legal issues in American Law and language concerns (e.g. pronoun use).”
“The trilogy of books should give members of the faithful much hope as they gather for the Synod on Synodality,” she concluded.
The question of how the Church should respond to gender ideology and the practical policies that should follow its teaching is a live issue among the Catholic bishops in the U.S.
Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana, this week released guidelines for all Catholic schools in his diocese ensuring that all policies align with the Church’s teaching on sexual identity. In those guidelines, Bishop Rhoades rejected so-called “gender ideology,” affirming that sexual difference is from God, there are only two sexes, male and female, and the sexual identity of the human body cannot be changed.
As CatholicVote previously reported, the guidelines prohibit the adoption of “preferred pronouns” by school staff, the recommendation or administration of the use of puberty blockers or hormone infusions, and the teaching of “gender ideology” in classrooms. The guidelines also require that participation in sports, the use of single-sex bathrooms, and the use of locker rooms all be done in accord with a person’s “God-given sexual identity, that is, his or her biological sex.”
Bishop Rhoades’ guidelines follow an instruction of the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Conference (USCCB) forbidding so-called “gender transition” surgeries and drugs as contrary to the natural order inherent in the human body and intended by God as Creator, and as immoral mutilations of the human body and chemical sterilization of minors.
That document, “Doctrinal Note on the Moral Limits to Technological Manipulation of the Human Body,” was written by the bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, which is chaired by Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas. The text was published March 20, 2023, and, while directed especially to Catholic medical institutions, lays out the principles of a Catholic approach to the issue in a way that is instructive for all the faithful.
The bishops condemned transgender ideology as a modern version of dualism that rejects the human body as a constitutive part of the human person. The bishops stated that such ideology, which maintains that a person can be born in the “wrong kind of body” and can “change” his or her body into that of the opposite sex, fails to see the inherent unity of body and soul as well as the natural order of the sexually distinct male and female body.
In a letter published September 29, 2023, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone and Oakland Bishop Michael Barber similarly denounced gender ideology as “radically opposed to a sound understanding of human nature.”
The USCCB previously condemned gender ideology, in a December 15, 2017 letter signed by Archbishop Charles Chaput, of Philadelphia, then-chairman of the USCCB Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth; Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, then-chairman of the Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage; Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz of Louisville, then-chairman of the Committee for Religious Liberty; and Bishop Joseph C. Bambera of Scranton, then-chairman of the Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.
Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City also issued a pastoral letter titled “On the Unity of the Body and Soul: Accompanying Those Experiencing Gender Dysphoria,” on April 30, 2023, which addresses gender dysphoria and transgender ideology from an authentically Catholic perspective.