The Pope on Gender and the end of Western Civilization

Every year in December, the Pope delivers an address to the Roman Curia. The annual speech has been dubbed “The State of the Union” for the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope gave this year’s address earlier today, and it is already making waves—for all the right reasons.   

News reports and punditry have focused most of their attention on the speech’s implications for gay marriage—namely that the Pope opposes same-sex unions of any kind. Nevertheless, the focus on the legal question of gay marriage is a rather shallow analysis of the speech. Make no mistake. The Pope’s words are nothing less than a broadside against any notion of same-sex marriage. But what he said actually goes much deeper than that.

He argues that there is a “crisis” threatening the very foundations of the family in the western world. The crisis is not merely about a particular social construct, but about what it means to be “authentically human.” The family is in crisis because mankind in the western world has forgotten what it means to be created in the image of God as male and female. The Pope takes on not merely homosexual marriage, but the entire foundation of modern gender theory—the idea that gender is something that you choose, not something that you are. I think it’s worth quoting him at length on this point:   Continue at Denny Burk