A new Vatican document invites important questions about dialogue and understanding, writes Kevin O’Higgins SJ
This month, the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education issued a document, ‘Male and Female He Created Them: Towards a Path of Dialogue On the Question of Gender Theory in Education’. While the focus is on gender theory in relation to education, the document is a useful summary of recent Church teaching on a much wider range of issues.
Most significantly, it highlights the fact that, at the heart of many of the current tensions between Church teaching and secular or ‘post-Christian’ ideologies, is a clash between two very different ways of understanding not just gender, but human life itself.
It is important to emphasise that the document is not an attack on transgender people. On the contrary, it condemns all forms of intolerance and fully acknowledges that “forms of unjust discrimination have been a sad fact of history and have also had an influence within the Church”.
Nor does the document close the door on dialogue with scientific and other research into issues related to gender. It recognises the need to engage constructively with such research in a spirit of openness to whatever advances our understanding of complex issues. The document is organised around three guiding principles: listen, reason and propose.
Dialogue
The hope is that a genuine dialogue may reveal some common rational elements which, in turn, can foster mutual understanding and indicate a path forward. However, genuine dialogue becomes impossible when a particular point of view is presented as unquestionable.
This is even more the case when the point of view is based on absolutised individual perspectives that are not open to rational challenge.
Unfortunately, this is precisely what occurs with certain currents of radical subjectivism, of which at least some versions of gender theory are an expression. It becomes clear that what is at stake is not merely a theory about gender, but a comprehensive view of human life, an anthropology, fundamentally at odds with the Christian understanding of what it means to be a human being and closed to the possibility of uncovering shared rational elements which might form the basis for dialogue and mutual understanding.
Time constraints alone mean that any presentation of viewpoints will be selective”
The conflict between competing anthropologies has been referred to frequently by Pope Francis. In Amoris Laetitia, for example, he speaks of new ideological perspectives on gender that undermine the very foundations of a Christian understanding of marriage and family.
This is so because the premises and presuppositions implicit in these ideologies contradict those at the heart of Christian and other traditional interpretations of the nature and finality of human life.
Indeed, they are at odds with the Christian understanding of reality as whole. Pope Benedict XVI spoke about school curricula which, while claiming to be neutral on questions related to the meaning and value of human life, “in fact reflect an anthropology opposed to Faith and to right reason”.
Frequently, talk of ‘ethos-free’ education naively assumes that it is possible to present an account of human life devoid of profound ethical implications. But, if only for practical reasons, that is an impossible task.
Time constraints alone mean that any presentation of viewpoints will be selective, and their treatment is unlikely to equip pupils with sufficient elements to judiciously ‘decide for themselves’. The elimination of any particular ethos will not result in neutrality, but rather an alternative ethos.
There are few questions, if any, more fundamental that ‘What does it mean to be human?’.
Inevitably, how we answer this question will determine our understanding of how we ought to live, what we regard as true and false, or right and wrong. At the heart of the anthropological proposals critiqued in the Vatican document is a collection of ideas which have become familiar in recent debate on key moral issues. While many of these ideas may have originated in the thinking of philosophers and others, they frequently filter down to the level of popular culture in the form of mere slogans. Endless repetition makes them seem self-evident.
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A current TV commercial for cars proclaims ‘Your choices define you’. The same message is conveyed, continuously, via mainstream print and broadcast media. This can be interpreted to mean that who I am depends exclusively on whatever I happen to choose, and my choices may even be in a permanent state of flux.
Implicitly, this would involve rejecting the notion of any external, objective checks on my chosen self-definition. There would be no such thing as an essential ‘human nature’ to challenge my personal choice of identity. My essential ‘self’ would even be divorced from my bodily biological reality. The Vatican document speaks of “a gradual process of denaturalisation, that is a move away from nature and towards an absolute option for the decision of the feelings of the human subject”.
Clearly, such a view is incompatible with the Christian understanding of reality and human nature. The notion of objective criteria of truth and goodness, knowable by means of reason, is replaced by a radical subjectivism.
The individual self and its personal choices become the only acceptable measures of meaning and value. On this view, it is hard to see how the traditional building blocks of social coexistence could possibly endure, since there would be no objective criteria for resolving differences and avoiding conflict.
It is important to emphasise that the document is not an attack on transgender people”
Instead of appeals to objective truth, goodness and justice, the most obvious recourse would be for like-minded individuals to band together in order to secure the triumph of their particular ideas and causes over those perceived as hostile.
Very easily, the subordination of reason to the will of individuals or groups morphs into something akin to a Nietzschean ‘will to power’ or a Hobbsean ‘war of all against all’.
We are confronted with the prospect of a potentially violent ‘state of nature’, very different from the goal of a harmonious natural state, ordered in accordance with in-built laws knowable by means of ‘right reason’, as envisaged by a Christian account of the meaning and purpose of human life.
The Vatican document sees all of this, and more, at stake in current debate around certain strands of gender theory. It does not claim to be the last word, but rather seeks to open up “a path of dialogue”. If the document succeeds in sparking open-minded discussion about the key issues, especially in the context of education, its main purpose will have been achieved.
The content of its 36 pages is far richer than could be conveyed in a short article and I urge everyone to read it. It is available for download at: https://www.americamagazine.org/sites/default/files/attachments/Vatican_Gender_Male_and_Female_He_created_them.pdf