Mons. Giampaolo Crepaldi, Archbishop of Trieste and director of the Cardinal Van Thuan International Observatory for the Social Doctrine of the Church, refers to the new colonization attempted by the West to impose the ideology of gender, in which enormous international pressures are exerted so that governments will change their legislation to allow new and unnatural arrangements regarding procreation, the family and life. This alarming trend is reflected in the Observatory's fourth annual report on the Social Doctrine of the Church which was presented in Trieste on January 26.
The Observatory, based in Verona, was established in 2009 to promote the application of the Social Doctrine of the Church to all sectors of Christian life, and was inspired by the life and work of Cardinal Francois Xavier Nguyen Van Thuanh (1928-2002) of Vietnam, who was president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace from 1998 till his death.
Van Thuanh, a nephew of South Vietnam's late President Ngo Dinh Diem, had a distinguished career in the local Church. One week after being named Coadjutor Archbishop of Saigon, the city fell to the Vietcong and he was arrested, not so much for being a bishop but because he was a nephew of the infamous Diem. He spent 13 years in prison, nine of them in solitary confinement, and his later account of how he survived those years in prayer and perseverance has inspired Vietnamese Catholics. He was released to house arrest in 1988, and three years later, was allowed to go to Rome on condition that he would not return to Vietnam. He worked for a refugee agency in Geneva and became a much-sought speaker on the international circuit. In 1994, John Paul II named him vice president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, becoming president when Cardinal Roger Etchegaray retired in 1998. In 2001 he was named a cardinal. He died of cancer in September 2002. The cause for his beatification formally began in 2007 on the fifth anniversary of his death.
The following is the introductory synthesis of the Fourth Report prepared by the Observatory's Editorial Committee{
The new colonialism:
How the ideology of gender seeks cultural dominance -
It has already succeeded in once-Catholic Argentina
The phenomenon of the “colonization of human nature” emerged with all its pervasive power and might in 2011, the year to which this Fourth Report refers. We consider this to be the new datum of interest for the Social Doctrine of the Church, making it necessary to rethink cultural and political strategies on the world level.
This year as well there have been grave emergencies on the world stage linked to poverty and exploitation, but we nonetheless feel that albeit dramatic in their own right, they do not represent anything new, nor do they constitute a cause of damage comparable to this “colonization of human nature”.
This phenomenon is spreading on a vast scale also as a result of the immense resources invested in it and the militant mobilization of the mass media. Its concrete aspects can be seen in the way it undermines social bonds, functionally fragments interpersonal relations, heightens disincarnated individualism and strives to remould social relations no longer on the basis of human nature, but rather on the basis of individual and self-referential desires.
It would suffice to consider the case of Argentina, which we illustrate in the Five Continents section. In the course of one year alone, 2011 in fact, added to the legislation of that great nation of Christian tradition were the following parliamentary acts:
- A law on artificial procreation, which attacks the very nature of procreation;
- A law recognizing “gender identity”, which saps the very nature of the family;
- A change in the Code of Civil Law to permit the practice of “the uterus for rent”
[surrogacy - in which women who are unable to bear their own children because they no longer have a womb use a surrogate womb, that of a healthy young woman who is willing for the right sum to have a couple's embryos resulting from in-vitro fertilization to be placed into her uterus, bear the baby for nine months and deliver him or her, to be handed over to the baby's genetic parents], which sabotages the very nature of parenthood.
Some of the bills in question actually became law early in 2012, but had been drafted and discussed the year before. Some are still on the agenda of one branch of Parliament after having been approved by the other branch, but the trend is crystal clear.
In the space of a single year the foundation of Argentine society at large has been revolutionized, the notion of “human nature” has been discarded, and the inspiration of the Catholic faith for the construction of society has been shunted aside.
It would be mistaken to consider the issues of procreation and family as merely sectoral in nature. They have a constituent and structuring influence on society as a whole, and hence the new Argentine laws tend to literally dismantle society as we know it today in order to construct a completely different one.
It is by no means a question of mere adjustments. Argentina had received from its Spanish colonizers the Christian vision of the individual and life, and Argentines have always sustained that this legacy is part and parcel of their identity as nation.
At present, however, Argentina is in the process of importing exactly the contrary from secularised Spain, that is to say, a clear refusal of a moral and religious life imprinted by natural law and the Catholic faith, in exchange for a radical libertarian outlook whereby nature is set against culture, and liberty is understood as emancipation from nature.
Behind such laws now assaulting both Latin American and other countries (in the Philippines the Church is engaged in a stiff battle against the law on contraception, which is but the leading edge of what we might call the new post-natural approach to procreation and the family) with quite disquieting velocity and violence is an ideology, the ideology of gender, hand in hand with vast economic resources invested by international lobbies and political support on the part of individual countries and international organizations.
The European Union is the main financier of abortion in the world and the agencies of the United Nations are hyper-active channels for these anti-nature and anti-family ideologies. This also poses a very serious question about the usefulness and sustainability of these organizations.
This is the reason why our Fourth Report dedicated its study on the “problem of the year” to the ideology of gender, and allocated pride of place as the teaching of the year to the speech delivered by the Holy Father at the Reichstag in Berlin on 22 September 2011, when he proposed anew the doctrine of natural moral law as the basis and foundation of political power.
The ideology of gender encountered little or no opposition as it spread in advanced countries and is by now also being taught in textbooks used in public schools without giving rise to very much in the way of protest. It is now being exported to emerging and poor countries in a systematic way.
It is a subtle and pervasive ideology which evokes “individual rights” that the Western world has raised to the level of dogma, and a presumed equality conferred on asexual or abstract individuals in order to lead the way to a dismantling of the entire structuring of society.
If sexuality understood as behavior and not sex understood as an anthropological datum is at the origin of social relations, then it becomes something we 'choose' not something 'given' to us.
Under the gender theory, individuals in the abstract should be able to choose their sexual orientation regardless of their natural state, the datum with which they were born. This would mean discriminating against heterosexuality, or sexual difference, and the cultural imposition of transsexuality, or sexual indifference. It would come down to an absolute dominion of technology
[??? I see it more as the dominion of selfish will!] in human relations.
Technology has made it possible to emancipate culture from nature, and hence has created unnatural situations in which it possible to be a mommy without being a woman, a daddy without being a man, a man while still being a woman, a woman while still being a man, a father or mother without knowing of whom, and a child without knowing of which father or mother.
This has all denatured sexuality, rendering it as a mere functional exercise by persons bereft of authentic identity. What we have now is not the absolutization of sex, but the absolutization of sexuality, whereas sex
[as the inherent difference God confers on his human creatures to enable them to perpetuate the human species] is shunted aside, a topic that only the Catholic Church seems willing to talk about today.
The ideology of gender is a new attempt by the West to colonize the rest of the world. But among the many negative aspects of the old colonialism there were also some heroic features, and it was driven by the desire to export something meaningful
[such as Western civilization which in at the height of the colonial era still represented a great legacy with its synthesis of Greco-Roman culture with Judeao-Christian principles].
This new western colonialism is the exportation of nothingness. Abstract and asexual individuals are in fact identity-less, except for the identity they arbitrarily assign to themselves. In their quest to divest themselves of any and all natural characteristics,
they postpone their identity to future choices and future contacts with other individuals, becoming subservient to the worst of conditioning factors: nothingness.
[Sounds murky to me. What I thought the argument was leading to, which makes sense is, rephrasing what the sentence tried to say: "In defining themselves by the choices they make and the relationships (not contacts) they choose to have now and in the future, then the 'gender'-driven are really led by belief in nothing but whatever is expedient and pleasing to them at the moment."]
The new ideology of gender imbues all aspects of society and seeks to reshape it on unnatural bases. The inevitable consequence of recognizing de facto heterosexual cohabitation and same-sex unions as equivalent to traditional marriage is the reform of family law, fiscal law, and the aims and methods of educational structures.
The fact that it has become impossible to morally condemn homosexuality without the risk of being formally charged with homophobia compromises the free expression of ideas and the education of children, and challenges the idea of projecting the heterosexual family as the model family. The “new families” are championed by the mass media with no possibility of frank debate because this is the one and only prevailing school of thought among them.
Public authorities have mostly abdicated their role to safeguard the public morality of society. By abstaining from fostering a vision linked to natural moral law in these constituent fields, limiting themselves to registering the desiderata of citizens and turning them into rights, and accepting a complete pluralism of ethical behavior, they have retreated from ethics and are then unable to restore that dimension in other areas of social life because it has disappeared from the fundamental spheres of that life.
If relationships are personal only in questions of procreation and family, if the necessary complementarity of sexes is ignored, what kind of human relations outside of family relations can result?
The seriousness of the situation is not widely perceived, and even active proponents of the Social Doctrine of the Church at all levels pursue other issues, which certainly are not to be underestimated, but this means they do not concentrate on this essential challenge.
Essential because gender theory and all its corollaries de-structures essential elements and transform society into a set of functional roles regulated by contracted procedures.
If being a man or a woman is only a function assumed by personal volition, all the other dimensions of society will become functions to be assumed as a result of personal volition, But a society without duties cannot survive.
From here on, what follows is more my paraphrase of what the article says, rather than presenting it word for word, though I try to keep as much of the words and syntax as I can. I resort to this because the expression gets murkier (and I don't think it is just because of faulty translation by the Observatory's translators of the Italian original, nor an unclear idea of what they are trying to say, because I think I can understand the sense that they fail to articulate clearly):
The subversion being perpetrated by this world view necessarily concerns Catholicism. We considered above the example of Argentina, a country that was once outstanding for its Christian tradition.
The decision to ignore the natural order of being human may initially seem focused against nature itself, but it doesn't take much to see that this is against the Christian religion as well.
The abolition of the natural family by law prevents people from living the experience of family. [I'm leaving that sentence the way it was written in order to dispute it. Law cannot abolish the natural family - it just allows unnatural living arrangements to become legally equivalent to the natural family, and this necessarily weakens the family as institution by diluting what it means to be a family. And yes, unnatural arrangements will never 'provide the experience of family', so that is how law 'prevents' those who are in such unnatural arrangements from 'living the experience of family'.]
In fact, living the experience of family has a social function, being an apprenticeship for living in the larger society. But it also has a religious function: the vocabulary of Christian life uses the terms for family, and whoever does not know what Father, Mother, Child, Bride and Spouse mean, cannot understand the relationships inherent in Christianity.
Eventually, not living the experience of the natural family destroys society ['subverts, undermines, damages', perhaps, but 'destroy'?], and above all, helps to destroy the Church. In Argentina, as in other secularized countries, people want Christianity to just disappear, by depriving it of the conditions it needs for being known and understood.
The divergence from nature promoted by laws that minimize natural procreation and the role of the traditional family is a challenge that must be joined in a cultural battle. In the eyes of the anti=nature forces, the sexual identity with which each person is born is nothing but a biological datum that can be ignored... But besides the expression of a person's 'congenital sex' in physiological terms, this inborn and essential characteristic has a metaphysical and existential dimension that cannot be overlooked in the cultural battle over gender theory.
Active proponents of the Social Doctrine of the Church cannot overlook this dimension, and applying the doctrine on the level of the social sciences alone is failing to do battle against the secular attempt to colonize human mentality.
All these subjects and issues officially entered the Social Doctrine of the Church with Benedict XVI's Caritas in veritate. But the attention of those active in the Church’s social doctrine is still mostly focused on more traditional social issues.
The Christian people at large are still far from well informed about these challenges. It is difficult to rally widespread militancy against trends such as these. There must be a strategic change with new priorities aimed at fighting back these attempts to impose unnatural concepts of marriage and family on contemporary society.
Thus, this Report includes an article buy Mons. Crepaldi on the 'non-negotiable principles' necessary to do battle against the new, radical and pernicious ideologies of gender and contradiction of nature.
Activists promoting the Social Doctrine of the Church should take them on as priorities in no uncertain terms - to mobilize consciences to respect these principles and to wield in the non- violent battle against those who wish to eliminate them...
The commitment to non-negotiable principles must be cultural, legislative and political, so that procreation and the family are not reduced to functions but rather seen as they are - expressions of being human, in the intrinsic complementarity of male and female. This cannot be possible without a deep life of faith and without the missionary thrust of a new evangelization.
The original English version of the above summary may be found on
www.vanthuanobservatory.org/nostri-libri/libro.php?lang=e...