Leela Ramdeen, Consultant at the Catholic Commission for Social Justice and an Attorney-at-Law, recently delivered a thought-provoking address at a significant conference organised by The Trinidad and Tobago Council of Evangelical Churches.
Standing in for Archbishop Charles Jason Gordon, Ramdeen dissected the theme: Our children, our responsibility: Building healthy children, healthy relationships, and healthy families for a strong nation, specifically delving into the intricate facets of gender ideology from a robust Catholic perspective.
Ramdeen emphasised the Church’s mission to proclaim inconvenient but vital truths in all seasons. She warned of the dictatorship of moral relativism, which denies universal moral principles authored by God Himself and etched into the human heart. From the quicksand of relativism has emerged the false philosophies of radical gender ideology that rebel against humanity’s very design.
As Archbishop Gordon stressed, Scripture reveals God created humanity male and female, prescribing the sexual binary through which new life is conceived. Tragically, the divorce between body and feelings has birthed a fluid “transition” between man and woman based on inner impulses detached from biology. When subjective emotions dictate realities contrary to our objective design, truth loses all meaning.
Against such subjectivist denials of biological sex, the Catholic Church continues to uphold the definition in the Rome Statute codifying only two sexes across humanity.
God imprinted this binary complementarity and directed the flourishing of fruitful, lifelong marital union between male and female, imaging Christ’s relationship with His Bride. Anti-Christian ideologues now aggressively seek to indoctrinate children to reject this loving paradigm of masculinity and femininity.
Ramdeen called Catholics to confidently resist this subversion of truth, facing the wrath of critics. Pope Francis too condemns the global spread of gender ideology infiltrating societies’ central institutions like an ideological colonisation, bringing confusion especially to youth.
While pastoring those dealing with sexual confusion requires deep compassion, the Church cannot condone intellectual falsehoods that would dismantle humanity’s identity from birth.
Regarding homosexuality, the Church proclaims that severing sexuality from procreative marital union objectively misses God’s design for human flourishing, even as it affirms the immeasurable worth of each person.
Pope Francis recently reiterated neither Church teaching nor policy blesses same-sex unions, which depart from marriage’s fruitful symbolism of divine creative love.
In these bewildering cultural times, clergy and laity must unite to instruct the faithful and confront society’s acceptance of ideological untruth. We must point our institutions back to the beauty of male and female in covenant union. As followers of Jesus Christ, we have nothing to fear when standing on the rock of truth and love.
Delving deeper into core Catholic concerns
Expanding on core points, Ramdeen echoed Pope Benedict XVI in lamenting today’s enthronement of relativism, which denies moral absolutes, instead enthroning personal desire as the highest ethic. This divorces truth from objectivity rooted in creation and infects law, media, and education.
Gender ideology epitomises this subjectivist divorce of truth from body and biology. It exalts personal feelings over chromosomes and reproductive organs as determinative of whether one is male or female, father, or mother.
But maleness and femaleness are not malleable putty we shape according to the whims of emotions. Woman means an adult human female; man means an adult human male. No inner “identity” can transform this objective birthright.
Society plays along with the notion children should determine their “gender identity” before even reaching adolescence. This defies common sense. Yet activists lobby governments to enforce this ideology through law and school curricula at younger and younger ages.
The Church also forwards formal objections raised by Pope Francis and various bishops against enshrining gender ideology through so-called “comprehensive sexuality education”. These graphic programmes encourage children to “explore” aberrant sexual behaviours that endanger innocence and health.
Finally, while extending compassion towards those experiencing deep confusion, we cannot pretend that reinforcing reversible life-altering gender “transitions” reflects sound pastoral medicine. True pastoral care should compassionately help align hearts, minds, and bodies back towards the harmony of revealed truth.
In closing, Christ’s flock ought not mirror the anxious tenor of these times by compromising age-old wisdom grounded in creation and conscience. With clarity and conviction flowing from God’s design, we must push back against radical assaults on reality, prudently inoculating families against corrosive ideologies aiming to reinvent humanity itself.
