The Vatican Faces the “Pro-Gender” Media Wave

The outcry was not long in coming: just a few hours after the publication of the text entitled "He created them male and female", from the Congregation for Catholic Education, the biggest international media outlets attacked the position of the Roman dicastery on gender ideology.

“The document came as a blow to (homosexual) activists, who say that such a stance will only alienate vulnerable people from the Church in a time where a lot of modern society has acknowledged, embraced, and are celebrating LGBT communities,” said Meghan Mohan for the BBC, on June 10, 2019.

On the same day, Jason Horowitz and Elisabetta Povoledo, for The New York Times, sees that the Vatican has in citing: "He created them male and female", “flatly rejected what it cast as the notion that individuals can choose their gender, releasing its first extensive document on the issue.” Ironically, while not having to spell things out in this publication which comes at a time when “Western countries are increasingly wrestling with the social and legal implications of more fluid definitions of identity.”

In France, Cécile Chambraud for Le Monde on June 11, explains that “the Vatican calls for resistance against 'gender ideology,’” taking a swipe in passing at a document published “in a storm triggered by sexual violence within the Catholic Church, but also by highlighting the prevalence of homosexuality in the clergy,”- a mixture about which one might wonder if it conforms to the code of ethics of a so-called newspaper “of reference.”

The American news channel CNN, for its part, has made the choice to let the American Catholic defenders of the homosexual cause react in the New Ways Ministry (NWM) organization, based in the state of Maryland.

For NWM’s director, Francis DeBernardo, the Roman document is “a harmful and dangerous instrument,” which could lead “to self-harm, addiction, and even suicide,”—the art of wielding hyperbole for partisan purposes.

The newspaper La Croix of January 11, 2019 prefers to deliver a more irenic reading: Nicolas Senèze, omitting to quote the passages in which gender ideology is clearly pointed out, prefers to insist on “the choice of dialogue” which, according to him, would be the Vatican’s preference.

Jay Brown of the Human Rights Campaign—the largest LGBT rights group in the US—did not disappoint: the activist publicly condemned the position of the Church, which, according to him, “sends a dangerous message that anybody who experiences gender diversity is somehow less worthy.”—No comment.