The German Bishops’ conference has issued a document to be implemented in Catholic schools that rejects the Church’s teachings on sexuality. Gone is the teaching that there are but two sexes, male and female. The bishops, with three exceptions, teach that there is a “diversity of sexual identities.” Not only that, they falsely claim it is a “fact,” rooted in science.
Should teachers address a boy named Sam, who now claims he is a girl named Sue, as Sam or Sue? The bishops say teachers should use language that reflects “the diversity of sexual identities,” allowing students to make their own judgments. So the right answer is “Sue.”
This division in the Catholic Church is taking place at a time when Pope Leo XIV is embarking on his first international trip, the purpose of which is a call for unity in the Christian world. He has his hands full.
Leo has already affirmed Church teachings on sexuality, saying the family is founded on the “stable union between a man and a woman.” When he was the bishop of Peru he spoke against the idea that there is a “diversity of sexual identities,” which is what gender ideology holds to be true.
“The idea of promoting gender ideology is confusing because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist. God created man and woman, and the attempts to confuse ideas about nature will only harm families and people.”
This is consistent with what the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches. “God created man in his own image…male and female he created them.”
Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, was even more blunt. He once referred to gender ideology as “demonic.” In his 2016 exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, he wrote, “We cannot separate the masculine and the feminine from God’s work of creation,” saying the “biological elements” are “impossible to ignore.”
In 2019, the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education issued an authoritative document, “Male and Female: He Created Them.” It said that gender ideology “denies the difference and reciprocity in nature of a man and a woman and envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family.”
In 2024, the Vatican Declaration on Human Dignity, Dignitas Infinita, underscored Church teachings on this subject. It said gender ideology “is extremely dangerous since it cancels differences in its claim to make everyone equal.” Similarly, this ideology “intends to deny the greatest possible difference that exists between living beings: sexual difference.”
It is not the job of the Catholic League to tell the Catholic hierarchy what they should do. But it is our job to keep Catholics up-to-date on what is going on in the Catholic Church, and this is especially true at a time when the Holy Father is calling for unity.
