In an interview with the Argentine daily La Nación, Pope Francis said he is not working on a new encyclical or a document on gender ideology. The Sovereign Pontiff answered questions from Elisabetta Piqué, at St. Martha’s House, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of his election on March 13, 2013.
Aired on March 10, 2023, excerpts from this interview were published by Vatican News the following day. “No,” he is not preparing a new encyclical, he assured the Argentine journalist, while some rumors suggested that he was at work on the gender issue.
Francis said he was not asked to write a gender-themed document. Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk, Archbishop of Utrecht, however, declared that he had made this request to the Pope.
In this regard, the Pope repeats that he “always distinguishes between what pastoral care is for people who have a different sexual orientation and what gender ideology is. They are two different things.”
“Gender ideology, today, is one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations. It goes beyond the sexual sphere. Why is it dangerous? Because it blurs differences and the value of men and women. All humanity is the tension of differences. It is to grow through the tension of differences. The question of gender is diluting the differences and making the world the same, all dull, all alike, and that is contrary to the human vocation.”
This ideology is not the “way to progress” and, ultimately, “cancels humanity.”
On this occasion, the Pope made a point of specifying that over the past decade he had applied what had been fixed before the 2013 conclave which elected him. “It was the College of Cardinals itself that set the course. I didn't do anything other than get this started," he said.
