Gender ideology is the “most worrying sign of the current ideas about man,” Monsignor Tony Anatrella, a psychoanalyst, told an audience of African bishops in Ghana late last month. Speaking on the pope’s most recent encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate,” the French priest and consultor to the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family, said that a new anthropology, a new way of viewing the nature of human beings, has grown in the last fifty years that is deeply antithetical to traditional Christian thought and jurisprudence, Lifesite News reports.
“The anthropological heresies that we are having to face, once again in history, are in need of a new evangelization,” said Msgr. Anatrella.
In his lecture, “Caritas in Veritate: the Family and the Theory of Gender,” Msgr. Anatrella said that the encyclical addresses this new ideology “which, under the guise of science … suggests that man is the result of culture and it is built independently of human nature and universal laws inherent in his condition.”
“The theory of gender is the most problematic sign of current ideas about man,” and has its roots in the 18th century “Enlightenment” that started to “deconstruct the concepts of man with a different religious anthropology.”
This new set of theories rejected the “religious dimension” that “was intrinsically related to the meaning of rights” in law.
Gender theory proposes the concept that human beings have no inherent nature, but have only characteristics, including sexuality, that are molded by environment and upbringing. Thus “gender” becomes a malleable “social construct” and a person can be male or female, or neither, at will.
He said that precisely the “moral and anthropological” social destabilization warned of by John Paul II has come about in recent years.
“How can we not see that we create here a new form of violence?”
These theories, he said, are “well worn by UN agencies, NGOs, the European Parliament in Strasbourg and the Brussels Commission.”
SIC: CTHAS