In an interview with the Spanish news outlet El Debate, Sanz said this is a time of “great anthropological confusion.” Asked whether the confusion is also present within the Church, he lamented that there was “no doubt” it is.
“Gender ideology has penetrated the Church,” he said. “The anthropological confusion that has to do with the relationship between man and woman, with the truth of the male, with the truth of the female, and with the pedagogy of letting children grow healthily without redirecting them so that they can affiliate themselves to your perverse anthropology… All this has penetrated the Church. We see this when in schools, in teaching, and even in catechesis there are expressions and gestures in which one recognizes an ambiguity or, clearly, a capitulation.”
The archbishop also warned that priests and bishops are being pressured to speak of topics that are part of progressive ideologies rather than the saving truths of the Gospel, which he denounced as a betrayal of the faith.
“We have to be very attentive because we can be talking about the topics to which we are dragged, so that we do not talk about what is truly worthwhile,” Sanz insisted. “That is a way of betraying the message of Christ, the Good News of his Gospel, and what the tradition of Christianity has always defended.”
The Spanish prelate continued that priests and bishops ought to reject the imposition of gender ideology and the lie of climate change, saying, “Today, if you do not speak with the jargon of gender ideology, if you do not mention climate change, if you do not carry the pin and the 2030 agenda in your guts, it seems that you are in another world and you are cornered.”
Well, then: no pin, no agenda, no climate change, no gender ideology. And, therefore, we will have to tell those groups that support and defend all this, and also impose it on you — and if you do not accept it, they take away the subsidy that they have never given you — that, at least some of us, we do not give ourselves to this.
Asked whether voices within the Church are cowed by fear when it comes to opposing ideological attacks on the faith, he affirmed that fear of retaliation does often keep clergy quiet. Drawing inspiration, however, from those who are outspoken in the face of ideological persecution, the archbishop continued, “Others, however, are more courageous, freer, and we look to them to learn a little about what the Church should be.”
Distinguishing between a prudent temporary silence and “being mute,” Sanz said the latter “is always born of cowardice.” “It is one thing to be prudent and another thing to be a coward,” he insisted.
Asked to comment on the confusion caused by recent documents from the Vatican, including Fiducia Supplicans, which allows priests to “bless” adulterous and homosexual “couples,” the archbishop condemned the acceptance of transgender ideology and homosexuality as attempts to “re-create” man “according to my ideological proposal.”
Dubbing the document “Fiducia complicans” Sanz declared, “Just a few weeks before Fiducia Supplicans, there was another document from the Doctrine of the Faith that established that transsexual persons who have undergone hormone treatment can be baptized. But how will they be baptized: according to the sex with which they were born, or with which they have been registered after the hormonal or surgical intervention? That is the question.”
This is what I mean when I speak of ambiguous and strange confusion, in which the image and likeness of man and woman is being rewritten and rewritten. Today not only the histories of wars won or wars lost are being rewritten: the original project is also being rewritten. Because the old and unique temptation of man is to want to be like God. And personal sin is nothing more than the clumsy commentary of that old and unique temptation: to want to be like God.
This approach to transsexualism is indicating that I want to create man, as God created him. And, therefore, I allow myself to create or recreate him according to my ideological proposal. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith does not clarify this point and, therefore, leaves the door open, with a notable dose of ambiguity, for someone to have to say “yes” or “no” afterwards. In the particular churches, it is the bishops who have this responsibility.
Asked whether such criticisms of Vatican documents and the confusion resulting from them were a criticism of Pope Francis, the archbishop denied this but distinguished between what the Pope declares in a magisterial way and what he speaks as his own opinion, “what Pope Francis says and what Jorge Mario Bergoglio says,” which the archbishop acknowledged is not always clear.
“We always respect Pope Francis,” Sanz affirmed. “He is the successor of Peter … Therefore, what the Pope says in a magisterial act is always respected. It is another thing when he is returning in an airplane he allows himself a comment, or at the end of an audience he makes a joke. And he has a temperament that is conducive to it, as when you are with him personally… So sometimes the Pope does not really speak as Pope… Even in the encyclicals that he has published… there are questions that need to be qualified.”