Courtney McGrailFr Des O’Donnell
In an interview last month, Pope Francis mentioned a family he knew where a young boy expressed a wish to be a girl when he grows up. This desire comes from what is called Gender Identity Confusion. It is also called Gender Dysphoria or Transsexualism.
The Pope knows what psychologists have long recognised, namely that sexuality in all its expressions is a very complex subject. Nine major disorders known as sexual paraphilias are listed. Homosexuality is no longer catagorised as a disorder unless the person is anxious about it, but Gender Identity Confusion is. It exists when a person feels trapped in a body of the wrong sex. The journalist asked Francis about his approach to the person with this disorder.
There are two main theories about its origin. Biological facts may play a decisive role, or the condition may be socially learned. A child may be exposed to a variety of conditioning experiences that support behaving in a manner traditionally attributed to the other sex. Cases have been known when parents encourage this; they choose the child’s gender identity contrary to the child’s biological identity, and force the child to dress and behave like the other sex.
Gender theory
The Pope rejects this and says that it has its origin through “indoctrination of gender theory” in schools, in some countries. He calls this “ideological colonisation”. This and similar issues will soon become questions for teachers in Irish Catholic schools.
The Pope stresses that a person suffering from this disorder is not to be condemned, rejected or given facile answers like being told to just endure, to ‘offer it up’ or that it is God’s will. He stresses that instead, the afflicted person should be patiently accompanied with intelligence, discernment and gentleness.
He said that he knew of a woman who felt the need of surgery to change her sexuality, and who married successfully and who lived happily in a parish that had an older priest. However, this woman was condemned by a young priest who told her that she/he was on the way to Hell.
Some people – occasionally even a priest – can fail to recognise the complexity of the human situation and approach it with an instant solution or even condemnation. These people tend to have black-white answers for all moral problems.
Mature young and old priests know that all life – especially moral growth – is sometimes a journey against great odds accompanied with success and failure. A kind discerning friend walking with us can enable us to live patiently with our own permanent imperfections. This spiritual accompaniment has a long tradition in the Church. With an understanding guide accompanying us, the Christian pilgrimage can be blessed and ‘the bruised reed’ never crushed.
The struggling sinner is never condemned. What the Pope points to as evil is any attempt to programme a child into a psychosexual experience contrary to his or her biological sexual identity.
I have noticed that people who are ready to condemn tend towards having some degree of an illness called Obsessive Compulsivity.
This also expresses itself in their inability to live with any lack of instant clarity and of precision. Some tend to mask this tendency by stressing that they are very concerned about clear moral judgements about which they claim to be certain in all situations. Pope Francis is saying that many morally ambiguous situations can be helped – but not instantly solved – only with long accompaniment. He is concerned not merely about behaviour but about intention, effort and growth. Those who insist on quick immediate moral judgments forget the words of St Thomas: “The Ten Commandments are unalterably right about what is just, but what can alter are the criteria which can decide in particular cases whether this or that is murder, adultery or theft.”
The theologian Richard Gula has observed that, “Theology has moved from act-centred legalism to scripture and personalism”, and Pope Francis knows this well.
Fr Des O’Donnell OMI is a priest and a psychologist.
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