Silent and smiling, Pope offers an opening to ‘transgender’ advocates

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 14, 2024

No, Pope Francis has not said that the Catholic Church should end her opposition to sex-change operations. But he has:

  • Agreed to a meeting with advocates of “gender-altering therapy” arranged by Sister Jeannine Gramick of New Ways Ministry, “wanted Pope Francis to hear directly from transgender and intersex Catholics and those who support them.”
  • Issued no public statement that would express reservations about the arguments the “transition” advocates had made.
  • Declined to reaffirm the teaching—issued only a few months ago in Dignitas Infinita—that “any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception.”
  • Provided an opportunity for Sister Gramick to announce that as she had sought—and the Pontiff “eagerly accepted the opportunity”—the Pope had listened to “the voice of the Holy Spirit calling the Catholic community to break out of old, ill-informed teachings and practices.”

In a news release celebrating the meeting, New Ways Ministry identified the people who had spoken with the Pope along with Sister Gramick: two transgender individuals, the parents of another, and the co-director of a “gender medicine clinic.” If the Pope had any moral qualms about the choices they had made, or the operations they promote, his reservations were not recorded.

Nor did the Vatican make any attempt to correct the record. The Vatican has been silent on the October 12 meeting. So once again New Ways Ministry has scored a major public-relations victory, with Pope Francis sitting by, smiling quietly.

Not quite one year ago I wrote about a similar situation in which the Pope had acceded to the wishes of homosexual activists, this time in the aftermath of Fiducia Supplicans:

No, Pope Francis has not actually said that the Church can offer blessings for same-sex unions. He has not said that. But at this late date, can anyone still doubt that’s what he thinks—and that it is only a matter of time until he makes it official?...

The pattern is clear enough: the unwillingness to reaffirm the 2021 Vatican statement; the string of equivocal statements; the encouragement for a discussion of the question at the Synod; the failure to rebuke Church leaders who question the traditional Catholic stand. And now the friendly meeting with the leaders of New Ways Ministry, a group that has been repeatedly chastised for undermining Catholic orthodoxy.

Yes, it was a meeting with representatives of New Ways Ministry last year as well that gave Sister Gramick her platform for announcing victory, thanking the Pope for “his openness to blessing same-sex unions.” The Pope didn’t say anything himself. He didn’t need to.

These friendly October meetings with New Ways Ministry are remarkable in themselves, since they suggest that an organization that has drawn repeated criticism from Church leaders is now being invited into the mainstream. In 1999 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith found that the group’s position on homosexuality was “incompatible with Christian morality.” In 2011 the US bishops’ conference added a warning that “in no manner is the position proposed by New Ways Ministry in conformity with Catholic teaching and in no manner is this organization authorized to speak on behalf of the Catholic Church or to identify itself as a Catholic organization.”

Over the years several bishops have refused to allow representatives of New Ways Ministry to speak at events sanctioned by their dioceses. Now they have an open door at the Vatican, and Sister Gramick—who under the terms of the Vatican warning in 1999 was “permanently barred from any pastoral work regarding homosexual persons”—can set up friendly meetings with the Pope.

No, Pope Francis has not explicitly endorsed the work of this group that his predecessor called “unacceptable.” As on so many other occasions, he has only greeted the critics of traditional Catholic teaching, given them a platform, offered no opposition to their public statements, and left us all to draw our own conclusions.

Phil Lawler has been a Catholic journalist for more than 30 years. He has edited several Catholic magazines and written eight books. Founder of Catholic World News, he is the news director and lead analyst at CatholicCulture.org. See full bio.

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  • Posted by: grateful1 - Oct. 16, 2024 2:00 PM ET USA

    Can we please surround the word "transgender" with quotation marks? As a matter of scientific and ontological fact, no one can change his or her biological sex. When we adopt the language of those who think they can, we imply otherwise, whether we mean to or not.

  • Posted by: rsnewbill7950 - Oct. 15, 2024 10:19 PM ET USA

    My conclusion: Dante would not have put Pope Francis in Paradise or Purgatory...

  • Posted by: Randal Mandock - Oct. 14, 2024 5:59 PM ET USA

    So he welcomes, embraces, meets with, encourages, and promotes public dissenters from Catholic morality because the morality handed on to the Church by Christ consists of "old, ill-informed teachings and practices". If Francis is such a "big tent" guy, a man courageous enough to stand up to Christ, fearless in the face of irreformable moral absolutes, then why is he too timid, or perhaps too cynical, to invite Strickland, Burke, et al to a meeting where they can discern the Holy Spirit together?