Pope Says People Should Accept Their Bodies As They Were Created

In last week’s letter covering marriage and the family, Pope Francis’ Amoris Laetitia(“The Joy of Love”) apparently sides with The College of Pediatricians’ recent claim that “conditioning children into believing a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse.”

Francis’ letter states that “the young need to be helped to accept their own body as it was created” since believing we have “absolute power over our own bodies” might lead to the belief that “we enjoy absolute power over creation.”

The letter goes on to say that “an appreciation of our body as male or female [is] necessary for our own self-awareness in an encounter with others different from ourselves. In this way we can joyfully accept the specific gifts of another man or woman, the work of God the Creator, and find mutual enrichment.””

He argues that any attempt to cancel our differences in the two genders is merely an indicator that society “no longer knows how to deal with it.” He derides any ideology that “denies the difference and reciprocity in nature of a man and a woman and envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family.”

He also strongly discourages schools from teaching safe sex.

“Frequently,” he writes, “sex education deals primarily with ‘protection’ through the practice of ‘safe sex.’”

“Such expressions convey a negative attitude towards the natural procreative finality of sexuality, as if an eventual child were an enemy to be protected against.”

“This way of thinking promotes narcissism and aggressively in place of acceptance. It is always irresponsible to invite adolescents to toy with their bodies and their desires, as if they possessed the maturity, values, mutual commitment and goals proper to marriage.”

Somewhere else in the voluminous 261-page document, he also states that there are “absolutely no grounds” for seriously recognizing “homosexual unions.”

“In discussing the dignity and mission of the family, the Synod Fathers observed that, as for proposals to place unions between homosexual persons on the same level as marriage, there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.”

Talking to The Chicago Tribune, Mary E. Hunt, co-founder and co-director of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER) said, “It doesn’t seem to have penetrated into the mind of the Vatican on how sexuality and sexual ethics have changed.”

H/t: LGBTQ Nation