The folks at the Congregation for Catholic Education were surprised, apparently, by the reaction to the document they released last week on gender ideology in education. Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi, prefect of the Congregation, told the Catholic Herald: “It seemed to us that – perhaps underestimating then the echo it had – it was more a practical manual to give to our institutions, than a document the subject in a theoretical and abstract way.”
The document was published in several languages simultaneously, and there were explanatory pieces in L’Osservatore Romano and on the Vatican News website. It amounted to a denunciation of so-called gender theory, and called on Catholic schools to resist “attempts to negate the male-female duality of human nature”. The denial of this duality, it said, “not only erases the vision of human beings as the fruit of an act of creation but creates the idea of the human person as a sort of abstraction”.
