CV NEWS FEED // At a Friday audience, Pope Francis issued a sharp rebuke of far-left gender ideology, denouncing it as “the ugliest danger,” and a threat that would “eras[e] humanity.”
“Today the ugliest danger is gender ideology, which cancels out differences,” Francis declared. “Erasing differences is erasing humanity.”
“The life of the human being is a vocation,” the pope noted during his speech, adding that humanity “sometimes tend[s] to forget or obscure this reality.”
Obscuring differences “reduc[es] 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,” Francis explained.
“Man and woman are created by God and are the image of the Creator,” he continued:
Our being in the world is not a mere fruit of chance, but we are part of a design of love and are invited to go out of ourselves and realize it, for ourselves and for others.
We are called to happiness, to the fullness of life, to something great to which God has destined us.
Francis gave the remarks while addressing an international Congress on Vocations in the Vatican.
Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet and the French organization Research and Anthropology of Vocations Institute (CRAV) organized the two-day event. The Congress’ theme was “Man-Woman: Image of God: Towards an Anthropology of Vocations.”
Pope Francis made similar comments last year, calling modern gender ideology “one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations” during an interview with Argentine journalist Elisabetta Piqué.
“Why is it dangerous?” he asked Piqué during the March 2023 exchange. “Because it blurs differences and the value of men and women.”
“All humanity is the tension of differences,” he added at the time:
It is to grow through the tension of differences. The question of gender is diluting the differences and making the world the same, all dull, all alike, and that is contrary to the human vocation.
The Catholic News Agency (CNA) reported that Francis has “frequently used the term ‘ideological colonization’ throughout the 10 years of his pontificate.”
According to CNA, the pope has used the phrase “particularly to describe instances when aid money for developing countries has been tied to contraceptives, abortion, sterilization, and gender ideologies.”
