Gender theory – where people choose their gender – is destroying marriage, Pope Francis says.
He said it is a global war against marriage, which he described as God’s most beautiful creation.
He was speaking to a group of religious men and women and pastoral agents in Georgia.
“Today, there is a global war trying to destroy marriage… they don’t destroy it with weapons, but with ideas.
“It’s certain ideological ways of thinking that are destroying it…we have to defend ourselves from ideological colonization,” he said.
The pontiff was talking off the cuff, after taking down notes on the four questions posed to him by a priest, a seminarian, a married woman, and a young man.
The meeting took over an hour,.
He spoke through an interpreter doing live translation into Georgian.
About 250 people, including priests, religious, and seminarians, plus 140 representatives of lay pastoral councils were present.
Irina, mother of two children, had spoken about the challenges both Catholic and Orthodox families face in Georgia.
These include globalization.
She said it “doesn’t take into consideration the local values, the new views of sexuality as gender theory, and the marginalization of the Christian vision of life, particularly on our choice of educating our children as Catholic.”
The Pope has often spoken about ideological colonization and gender theory.
ideological colonization first refers to developed countries imposing ideas into developing nations.
This is often achieved by putting a tag on economic aid.
Gender theory or ideology instead refers to the idea that “sex” is what a person is biologically.
A configuration of chromosomes, hormones, reproductive units, and internal and external anatomy determines this.
Gender is what the person believes himself or herself to be.
Gender theorists say that people should be able to identify as male, female, in-between, neither or both.
They discourage the stereotypical gender-based divisions, such as dolls for girls and trucks for boys.
Irina also spoke about the challenge the Catholic community faces as divorce is available for the Georgian Orthodox .
It is not available for Catholics, with many parents seeing separation as the easiest way out of a hard situation.
Source
- cruxnow.com
- Image: www.chron.com
