America may be “slouching towards Gomorrah,” as late Judge Robert Bork put it, but one Catholic archdiocese is standing up straight — very straight. Of course, the Archdiocese of Denver is simply upholding its church’s definitive teaching, but this hasn’t stopped the mainstream media from registering shock that Catholic clergymen would actually be, well, Catholic.
At issue is that the archdiocese “has told local Catholic school administrators that they should not enroll or re-enroll transgender or gender non-conforming students,” as New York’s Daily News put it. The paper continued, writing November 8:
In a document published by the Denver Post on Monday, officials of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Church in Northern Colorado listed a series of guidelines on how local Catholic schools should deal with LGBTQ issues.
The 17-page document, which was confirmed by the archdiocese, is titled “Guidance for Issues Concerning the Human Person and Sexual Identity,” and it warns school administrators that “the spread of gender ideology presents a danger to the faith of Christians.”
Among the recommendations highlighted by the document, the archdiocese says that “a Catholic school cannot affirm a student’s identity as transgender, gender nonconforming, non-binary, gender-fluid, gender-queer, or any other term that rejects the reality [of] the student’s given male or female sexual identity.”
The guidance was first released several years ago, but wasn’t reported in the news until just recently. Sources told The Denver Post that it was distributed to school administrators again this year.
There’s much in the archdiocesan document, too, and The Liberty Loft’s Bob Unruh provided more detail, writing that
the procedures say even if trans students and parents “agree with ‘relevant school rules,’” the situation remains impossible as the two sides are “working from irreconcilable premises and moving toward incompatible goals.”
So, even enrolling such students is “not appropriate.”
Further, parental requests for school officials to address their children by an inaccurate pronoun, for them to be allowed to use bathrooms that disagree with their sex, or attend school events “as a couple” must be refused.
And, the guidance explains, schools cannot “recognize ‘two mothers’ or ‘two fathers’ as a family structure.”
The Daily Mail noted that the instructions say if a currently enrolled student is acting out such a role, they should not be re-enrolled.
The requirements further extend to teachers who choose to adopt non-biblical lifestyles, the report added.
The guidance also states that teachers who claim to have transitioned (an impossibility) are “not suited to teach in a Catholic school or to carry out the school’s mission in any capacity.”
“At the same time,” related The Denver Post, “the document implores schools to show compassion for gay and transgender students, saying ministry toward LGBTQ students should be executed with ‘charity and prudence’ and affirm God’s unconditional love while still being faithful to church teachings and ‘the truth.’”
Yet this isn’t good enough for sexual devolutionary critics, who insist on calling those upholding authentic Christian teaching “hateful” and “bigoted.” Among them is The Denver Post, which plays a typical “hidden commentary” game: It expresses and disguises its own opinions as “hard news” by quoting only people and entities that voice its desired views. The reader could get the notion that all of Colorado disagrees with the Church — and, of course, that’s the whole idea.
The Post cites establishment medical organizations (e.g., the American Psychiatric Association) — the type of entities that supported now-discredited COVID policy — which all claim that Christian sexual teaching is destructive. It cites Ben Mann, “new non-binary associate pastor at Englewood’s Mayflower Congregational Church,” who “works with people suffering from religious trauma,” as the paper puts it, and who’s “studying to be a therapist.”
The Post also quotes parishioner Tricia Williams, who, perhaps fancying that she speaks ex cathedra, claims the archdiocese stands in “opposition to a Catholicism rooted in love.” The paper mentions her daughter, Gaia Williams, who has multiple tattoos and body piercings, and writes that she “is queer but no less Catholic.” Perhaps the problem, though, is reflected in how Tricia named her girl after a mythical Greek goddess that has become a favorite of neo-pagans and the greentopian movement, which considers “Gaia” a personification of mother Earth.
The Post misuses words as well, mainly because it knows no better. It calls Tricia Williams “devout,” an impossibility for someone deviating from official Church teaching. It calls Denver’s archbishop, Samuel Aquila, “conservative,” even though this is a provisional political term that doesn’t apply when discussing the timeless, which Christianity is. The proper term is “orthodox” — as opposed to “heterodox.”
The paper also quotes people who claim that Aquila and other Catholic leaders “discriminate against the LGBTQ community.” But they didn’t mention that the sexual devolutionaries discriminate in its favor, demanding it receive a special dispensation from Church teaching.
Why, they don’t complain that adulterers are “discriminated” against by the clergymen or that fornicators, porn watchers, or those engaging in auto-eroticism are. Prohibitions against all these behaviors and more are part of the divinely-bestowed human sexuality model upheld by the Church. Would the sexual devolutionaries have Christians say that all these behaviors are sinful, but homosexuality and “transgenderism” are somehow virtuous? This is the type of irrationality they demand when cherry-picking their choice sins for special treatment.
Yet what the archdiocese upholds is simply common sense. As it writes in its guidance, for instance, “If teachers and administrators were to treat a same-sex couple as if their relationship — and the situation of two mommies or two daddies — were no different from the mom and dad couples of other families, then it would not be surprising for other students to assume that same-sex couples are ‘just the same’ as other couples and having two mommies or two daddies is no different from having a mother and a father.”
This is much the same as when a MUSS (Made-up sexual Status, aka “transgender”) man wishes to compete in women’s sports. Activists will trumpet his cause, talking about his feelings and his ambitions. Yet putting aside the MUSS agenda’s errancy, what of the feelings and ambitions of the multitude of female competitors, the majority? Whatever happened to the good of the many outweighing the good of the few?
Of course, though, we do people no favors by rubber-stamping their errant lifestyles. Moreover, the bad example set through doing so in school warps the grasp of reality and moral compasses of the other children. It’s a form of psycho-spiritual child abuse.
The Denver Post also quotes a parishioner, Sally Odenheimer, as saying that orthodox Christians “are not going to win.” She seemed to be echoing an old gripe against authentic Christianity: that it’s “always the enemy of new ideas,” as philosopher G.K. Chesterton put it. Yet this is a notion that Christians “have to be continually refuting, because it is such a very old idea,” Chesterton pointed out.
He explained that Christianity often does oppose “the fashion of this world that passes away” because it “has experience enough to know how very rapidly it does pass away.”
“Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes,” Chesterton later elaborated. And Christianity has for one of its “chief duties that of preventing people from making those old mistakes; from making them over and over again forever, as people always do if they are left to themselves.”
The sexual devolutionaries think they’re on the “right side of history,” but they confuse history with current events. Old or not, they’re making mistakes that will pass away. And when they do, Christianity will remain, still being reviled as the enemy of the latest “new ideas.”
