Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Milwaukee Archdiocese's Declares War on Transgender People
March 10, 2022
By Bill Berkowitz
The Catholic Church with its history of sexual abuse of children and covering it up, financial shenanigans, shuttered churches and dwindling numbers of parishioners, backing conservative politicians, supporting Trump, and championing anti-gay initiatives, has found a new target; transgender people.
If you are trans, Catholic and are living in Milwaukee, the archdiocese has come up with a new set of restrictive and oppressive guidelines. According to the National Catholic Reporter’s Brian Roewe, “the archdiocese's new rules stipulate that a person's biological sex dictate which dress codes they follow, that medications like ‘puberty blockers’ be barred on church property, and that transgender people and their families be directed to ministers and counselors who can provide support ‘in accord with the directives and teachings of the Church.’ The policy also bars use of preferred pronouns, a now fairly common practice in which people identify in advance how they wish to be addressed by others.”
Over the past twenty-plus years, Fr. James Keenan, SJ, a theology professor at Boston College, and vice provost for global engagement and director of the Jesuit Institute, has had many conversations about the complexity of gender dysphoria. Rather than creating new restrictions and barriers to discussing these issues, Keenan suggests the Church be more open, understanding and inclusive.
In a February National Catholic Reporter piece, Keenan wrote: (https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/what-one-priest-learned-listening-transgender-catholics):
These experiences were truly profound: Imagine what it is like to face the question that their own selves were telling them they had to investigate! They knew the degree of ridicule, rejection and violence that transgender people face. Why were they asking the question, except that something inside themselves kept demanding them to do so? By accepting the question to any degree, they knew that it meant accepting the pervasive judgmentalism and shaming that few others experience in the same way. And yet, their experience was that the question they encountered (How can I accept my gender when my body seems otherwise?) wanted them to find a reconciliation within themselves.
The Milwaukee archdiocese issued "Catechesis and Policy on Questions Concerning Gender Theory" (https://www.archmil.org/ArchMil/attachments/2022GenderTheoryfinal.pdf?utm_source=sendgrid&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=website), compiled at Archbishop Jerome Listecki's request by an ad hoc committee of the archdiocesan healthcare and bioethics committee, according to an email Listecki wrote to priests announcing the new policies, Roewe reported (https://www.ncronline.org/news/people/milwaukee-archdiocese-takes-aim-trans-persons-sweeping-new-policy).
According to Roewe, the Milwaukee archdiocese is not alone in issuing anti-transgender rules. “In the past two years, more than a half-dozen dioceses have issued similar guidelines addressing questions of gender. They include the archdioceses of Indianapolis and St. Louis, the dioceses of Springfield, Illinois; Lansing, Michigan; Marquette, Michigan; and Arlington, Virginia.* Minnesota's bishops also issued a joint document.”
In a speech to the Pontifical Academy for Life’s general assembly, Pope Francis labeled gender confirmation procedures as “manipulation” and a “choice.” “The biological and psychical manipulation of sexual difference, which biomedical technology allows us to perceive as completely available to free choice — which it is not! — thus risks dismantling the source of energy that nurtures the alliance between man and woman and which renders it creative and fruitful” (https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/catholic-churchs-oppression-against-trans-people-will-again-backfire/).
In June 2019, the Vatican released "Male and Female He Created Them: Towards a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education," which rejected the idea that trans people can exist and said the “ideology” aims “to annihilate the concept of ‘nature.’”
"My initial reaction was one of fear," Fr. Greg Greiten, pastor at Milwaukee's St. Bernadette Catholic Parish, told NCR about the new policy. "That we are not listening to the LGBTQ population once again, and the stories and the experiences of the LGBTQ community."
Paulist Fr. Stuart Wilson-Smith, an associate pastor in Chicago, tweeted that the policy represented "a callous, anti-intellectual and anti-human dumpster fire of a document unworthy of any association with the name of our Lord and brother."
The lives of transgender people "have become a lightning rod for people to declare certain ideological allegiances," said Craig Ford, a theology professor who studies sex and gender at St. Norbert College, in De Pere, Wisconsin. "And I think now that that's sort of boiling over into a Catholic discussion."
"As a general rule," the guidelines states, "in all interactions and policies, parishes, organizations, and institutions are to recognize only a person's biological sex."
"Permitting the designation of a preferred pronoun, while often intended as an act of charity, instead promotes an acceptance of the separability of biological sex and 'gender' and thus opposes the truth of our sexual unity," the guidelines state.
The latest flurry of Catholic Church led anti-trans guidelines follows on the heels of a 2019 document called "Male and female he created them" whose text stated that the view of gender existing along a spectrum was "nothing more than a confused concept of freedom in the realm of feelings and wants."
Apparently, none of the documents issued consulted with any transgender or gender-nonconforming Catholics.
Fr. James Keenan wrote that the Catholic Church’s way of dealing with gender issues is “similar to the way racists and white supremacists use "critical race theory" to attack those seeking to recognize the long-standing racist world we live in. A good offense is the best defense, they think; that's the Catholic tactic! The gender ideology flag belittles the terribly challenging world the transgender community lives in and is little more than a cheap shot at a very precarious group of people.”
Will the Catholic Church continue to condemn transgender people or learn to listen to voice in the transgender community? “And that,” writes Fr. Keenan, “means learning humility and learning to listen, especially to those people who are being terrorized not by the question they are facing but by the moralistic deafness of the church that thinks ‘it knows everything better than others.’"
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