Pope Francis, while rightly focusing on pastoral care for children and others with sex and gender confusion, also rightly described gender ideology which leads to poisoning and mutilating our children as “evil.” Just a few months ago, the Holy Father called it the “ugliest danger” of our time.
Originally published by Southern Nebraska Register
Before Christianity came on the scene, ancient Greek and Roman pagans did not consider children to be fully human persons like adults. Indeed, it is not too strong to say that Christianity introduced the concept of children that we have today, one in which we give children more concern than adults due to their vulnerability. This was truly a revolutionary concept.
Such a view comes directly from the commands of Christ, whose very strong view was also extremely counter-cultural. When the disciples tried to stop children from engaging with Jesus, he sternly rebuked them saying that the Kingdom of God belonged to the little children. Indeed, our Lord reverses the adult versus child priority, saying directly that adults must become like little children. And he reserves the harshest language of all for those who harm children: saying that it would be better if they were drowned in the sea with a millstone hung around their neck.
It is from this vision of little children that the Church had and continues to have its strong response to abortion and infanticide. It is this vision that makes the sex abuse crisis so reprehensible and the Church’s aggressive reaction to it in the last two decades an imperative. It is also from this vision that the Church criticizes the brutal manipulation of children when it comes to sex and gender. Perhaps it should not come as a surprise that as the voice of Christianity fades from the public sphere, we see a repaganized culture using children as experimental subjects—poisoning them with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and mutilating them with ghastly surgeries that forever alter their bodies.
God creates human beings male and female, along with various ways to express that maleness and femaleness. Joan of Arc, leading armies in battle, was just as much of a woman as any contemporary ballerina. A seminarian, wearing cassock and singing in a choir, is just as much of a man as any contemporary football player. It is bizarre and wrong, however, to pretend that men and women, boys and girls, are not bound by given male or female biological realities. And it is particularly heinous to harm children with drugs and surgeries in attempting to escape from these realities.
Pope Francis, while rightly focusing on pastoral care for children and others with sex and gender confusion, also rightly described gender ideology which leads to poisoning and mutilating our children as “evil.” Just a few months ago, the Holy Father called it the “ugliest danger” of our time.
Mindful of these realities, individual Catholics and Catholic institutions must resist gender ideology—particularly as it affects young people—whenever we find it. Unfortunately, and this was tragically true of the sex abuse crisis as well, preliminary investigations have found these evil and ugly practices present in the Church—including in some of our Catholic hospitals.
A group called “Stop the Harm” has compiled a database from publicly-available hospital records showing nearly 14,000 treatments related to sex changes that were delivered to minor children in the US—and nearly 150 Catholic hospitals apparently had codes for procedures suggesting they were involved. Catholic hospitals seemingly prescribed both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones—and not a few even performed mutilating surgeries on children.
I am grateful to say that there was no evidence that anything like this is happening within Catholic health care institutions in the Diocese of Lincoln, but as someone with pastoral leadership roles within the Catholic Medical Association and the Catholic Health Care Leadership Alliance—and as a follower of Christ’s command to give special priority to children—I cannot stand by in silence, knowing that Catholic institutions do this to the most vulnerable in the Church’s name.
It should be noted that some of the Catholic hospitals on the list appear because of one-offs or single digit counts. It is possible that in these cases hospital codes were confused and therefore should be easily rectified. It also could be possible that we are talking about a few rogue doctors or cases in isolated external clinics within the vast hospital systems who are the offenders, but this is not true in every circumstance. Many Catholic hospitals are participating in this ugly evil and full investigations should be carried out. And they should be done with the same vigor with which we have investigated other abuse of children taking place within Catholic institutions.
It is interesting that data-driven processes—particularly in light of the Cass Report, the most comprehensive evidence-based review of gender identity treatment of children —are leading countries in Europe, though previously onboard, to reject this kind of treatment in children. Despite not fully sharing our Christian understanding of the sexed human person, countries like the UK, Sweden, Finland, and several others have rejected such treatment of children as not having any grounding in science and that the risks are great with no evidence of long-term benefit. The European Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, which represents over 30 countries, has said that we need to stop experimenting on children, essentially admitting that we are experimenting on these vulnerable human beings without any evidence of long-term positive outcomes.
And it is not just the Cass Report. The New York Times recently did an investigation into a study of 95 children with “gender distress,” following them since 2015 in order to determine the results of giving them puberty blockers. Despite one-quarter being depressed or suicidal, the data show that drugs had no impact on the group’s mental health. Significantly, despite receiving nearly ten million dollars from the NIH for the study, the author (who is an activist in favor of this kind of medicalized transitioning) is refusing to publish the data because of fear that it will be “weaponized” by opponents of these procedures.
But a rigorous approach to science gives us good reason to being in opposition. The data show that about 80 percent of children with confusion about sex and gender grow out of it by the time they reach adulthoodand thus we should return to the well-established practice of “watchful waiting” as a pastoral response to children in these circumstances. We should offer them sound psychological counseling to address their distress. Loving them in the fullness of their God-given realities does not mean affirming a mistaken and incoherent concept of somehow ‘being born in the wrong body.’
Instead of leading them down the path that Pope Francis rightly named evil and ugly, Catholic individuals and institutions must protect and affirm children and the goodness of the body they do have. But woe to Catholic individuals and institutions who poison and mutilate children. Returning to the words of our Lord: it would be better for them to have a millstone hung around their neck and be cast into the sea.
+James D. Conley
Bishop of Lincoln
National Episcopal Advisor to the Catholic Medical Association
Chair of the Episcopal Advisory Board of the Catholic Health Care Leadership Alliance
November 7, 2024
