Those Who Have Ears to Hear

My initial thought about the recent Vatican document about the role of 'gender theory' in education was to be very critical of it. You will know, if you've been paying attention over the years, that I am not entirely on board with a notion of human identity that sweeps away the male-female polarity in favour of radical, down-to-the-atom individualism, and I note the confusion in modern culture between a voluntarism that declares 'you can choose whatever you want to be' and a determinism that insists 'be what you really are'. Nevertheless, while this lengthy document clearly feels the same way, talking a lot about 'confusion', it offers no understanding of where this confusion arises from, and consequently moves forward in no respect. And publishing it as Pride marches go on across the world was simply a deliberate insult.

That was what I was going to say, in brief. But then I discovered that the document is going too far for some Roman Catholics in evening mentioning the word: for them, homosexuals and transgender people should very much not be treated with 'respect' (although the Catechism of the Catholic Church para.2358 says explicitly that at least homosexual people must be respected - transgender identity doesn't get a mention there), and 'no one can dialogue with the Devil and come away the better for it'. So perhaps this text is more liberal than I realised.

But I come back to the general approach of the document. Rather like Pope Benedict considering the causes of clerical sexual abuse, and as all intellectuals have a habit of doing, it sees human beings as first and foremost representatives of ideologies. The great forces of thought and philosophy, right and wrong, flow through human societies and produce these people behaving in this way. So although it has a section headed 'Listening' ('it is necessary, above all, to listen carefully to and understand cultural events of recent decades'), what it means by 'listening' is in fact reading the past and therefore the present in a particularly ideologically-charged way (and telling the present that it is wrong). It very much doesn't mean listening to anyone in particular. Listen to people's actual experiences and you run the risk of sympathising with them; far easier to think, These people are simply deluded and we must explain to them why. Yet even were we to accept that an element of confusion and misconception affects people's experience of their own sexual identity; even we were to admit that some of that confusion, to put it picturesquely, might be sown in the world by the demons; that would not explain why human souls experience their sexual identity in a particular way, what deep springs of hurt contribute to the process, and would not even help us understand why God has 'made them male and female'. It is simply to take refuge in the certainties of war: it is to conceive, heretically, of God's world as not His at all, but as a battlefield in which the struggle might yet be lost. Society is right to turn aside from this stuff, and Anglicans are right not to ape it.