Column: From the Pastor
Toddlers try to get their way by throwing tantrums, but they are not the only ones. In “An Open Letter on Translating,” an heresiarch in 1530 justified altering the Letter of Saint James: “Dr. Martin Luther will have it so . . . Sic volo, sic jubeo.” (I want it; I command.)
This solipsism was updated in a 1966 book turned into a 1972 film about a twenty-year-old named Roy who demonstrated his desire to be his sister Wendy by dressing in her clothes. The title was: “I Want What I Want.”
What one wants may not be obtainable. For the adult still psychologically in diapers, the only recourse is to become flushed and scream at anyone who sticks to reality. That was the response of some when the Holy See’s Congregation for Catholic Education published on June 10 a document that said the denial of the natural duality of the sexes creates the idea of the human person as an abstraction “who chooses for himself what his nature is to be.” This is what Pope Francis, who has stressed the need to be charitable to people misled by such mental disorders, in 2016 called a “utopia of the neutral.” A utopia is nowhere.
In the same year, the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly explained, “The claim that it is possible to change one’s sex, or that sexual identity is fluid, contradicts scientific evidence, reason, the nature of the human person, and key tenets of the Catholic faith.” It is Gnostic dualism.
The term “gender” has commonly come to classify sex. So now we have an innovative vocabulary: transgendered, gender dysphoric, non-binary, and so forth. But neologisms fly in the face of the conclusion of Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the Johns Hopkins Hospital psychiatrist, that “gender reassignment” is “biologically impossible.”
In 1975 the American Psychological Association (APA), acting politically with no justifying science, declared that certain aberrancies are not pathological. Start with a lie and you can logically conclude with a lie. The APA’s “Non-Monogamy Task Force” now has endorsed polygamy and promiscuity, called “relationship anarchy.”
Only about 6/10 of one percent of humans consider themselves “transgendered,” although about 3% of malleable adolescents now identify as such, as the result of pedagogical propaganda. This is a sophisticated form of child abuse. Among all those who have had “reassignment surgery,” the suicide rate is 20 times higher than average.
Schoolchildren once knew the rhyme about the grand old Duke of York’s ten thousand men: “He marched them up to the top of the hill, /And he marched them down again. / When they were up, they were up, /And when they were down, they were down, /And when they were only halfway up, /They were neither up nor down.” That is not how armies should work, and that is not how male and female created in God’s image can ever work.
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Fr. George W. Rutler, S.T.D., is a brilliant scholar, author, convert, former pastor of Our Saviour in Midtown Manhattan, the closest Catholic parish near the site of 9-11, and now pastor of St Michael’s parish in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City. A donation of any amount may be made to the parish at: www.StMichaelNYC.com.
View Articles Father Rutler was ordained to the diaconate in Rome by His Eminence William Cardinal Baum in 1980 and received priestly ordination in St. Patrick's... MORE »
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