The three essays in this sixth issue of Letters from Rome are thematically unified in that they address what Cambridge historian Richard Rex has described as the third great crisis in the history of the Catholic Church.
The first crisis centered on the question, “Who is God?”—a question posed by the Arian heresy and resolved by the teaching of the Council of Nicaea on the divinity of Christ.
The second great crisis grew out from the question, “What is the Church?”—a question posed by the various sixteenth-century Protestant Reformations and resolved by the Council of Trent. The third great crisis—in which we are living, and which has caused immense personal suffering, cultural decay, and social dissolution—revolves around the question, “What is the human person?” Are there no “givens” in the human condition, such that we are infinitely plastic bundles of desires, all of which are morally commensurable? Or are there truths built into the world and us, truths that we can know by revelation and reason, which show us the way to personal fulfillment and social solidarity?
On the answer to that binary a great deal depends for both the Church and the world: as Theresa Farnan and Mary Hasson demonstrate in their dissection of gender ideology; as Fr. William Clare shows in his examination of some of the confusions of the past twelve years; and as Larry Chapp makes uncomfortably clear in his critique of how that ideology and those confusions have sent some Catholic theologians into a tailspin.
There is no more consequential issue at Conclave 2025 than this question of who we are as human beings. For if the leadership of the Church gets that wrong, or even waffles on the question, we are in the gravest difficulty as disciples and as a community.—XR II
The Anthropological Revolution and Its Challenge
by Theresa Farnan and Mary Hasson
Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor begins with a prophetic warning about the “systematic calling into question of traditional moral doctrine, on the basis of certain anthropological and ethical presuppositions.” His warning, written well before gender ideology permeated law, education, and culture across the developed world, was amplified decades later by Pope Benedict XVI, who recognized the crisis now at hand: “It is now becoming clear that the very notion of being—of what being human really means—is being called into question. . . . According to this philosophy [of gender], sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves. . . . The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious.”
Gender ideology, the anthropological revolution warned of by Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, emerged on the tailwinds of the twentieth century’s sexual revolution. It was endorsed by powerful interests, promoted by Big Business, Big Tech, and the arbiters of culture, and quickly became the dominant ideology in medicine and education. With the backing of powerful interests, it swept quickly across Europe, the Americas and Australia, then diffused throughout the Caribbean and parts of Asia. In its wake, it left devastating, ongoing harm. (Parts of Africa and the Middle East have eluded its powerful reach, for now.)
Recognizing the dangers it posed, Pope Francis too rejected gender ideology, often quite forcefully. He decried its deconstruction of sex and condemned the lies taught to children, that “everyone can choose his or her sex.” He called its distorted claims “ugly” and “wicked,” and its beliefs “dangerous,” which indeed they are. Premised on a godless autonomy, gender ideology asserts the individual’s right to self-determine an identity that rejects the meaning and permanence of sex, to alter the body according to one’s sex-rejecting desires, to displace one’s natural family with a “chosen family,” and to pursue sexual gratification unconstrained by moral norms or natural obligations. But gender ideology is “dangerous” not just because it is based on lies, but because it is a belief system meant to be lived out. Put differently, faulty anthropological premises lead to faulty moral conclusions, and, eventually, to devastating harm.
The past decade has seen an astounding rise in “LGBTQ” identification: 23 percent of Gen Z (31 percent of young women and 12 percent of young men) identify as “LGBTQ+,” as do nearly 10 percent of American adults overall. “Transgender or gender diverse” identification in U.S. teens also skyrocketed, rising to nearly 10 percent of U.S. teens (Pediatrics 2021). These changes are driven by culture, not nature.
Embracing gender ideology hasn’t produced more happiness, but has only increased risk of poor mental health and other “negative health outcomes.” At gender clinics worldwide, identity-distressed children and adolescents are subjects of experimental interventions that harm their healthy bodies, impair fertility, shrink genitals, stunt emotional growth, disrupt healthy functions, worsen mental health—and, in some cases, lead to amputated breasts or genitals. Despite a more tolerant and inclusive legal and “social environment,” “psychological distress and suicide behavior” among “sexual minority” youth is “worse” than in prior generations. Religiosity and spirituality are low, and declining, among people who identify as “LGBTQ+.”
In short, the world needs the truth, and the support to live it faithfully.
During Pope Francis’s papacy, however, some in the Church portrayed doctrinal fidelity as a barrier to pastoral care, a stumbling block to loving accompaniment, even though it was clear that pastoral outreach detached from the truth neither frees people from the harms of gender ideology nor provides guidance to pastors on the front lines of gender ideology’s “anthropological revolution.” Unfortunately, despite reaffirming the teaching of the Church on this crucial issue, Pope Francis added to the general confusion with a series of well-meaning but confusing pastoral gestures.
First, Francis’s photo ops and public meetings with “LGBTQ” activists sent contradictory messages that undermined his teaching on gender ideology. The media predictably spotlighted these meetings, portraying them as implicit support for gender ideology or outright encouragement for changes to Catholic teaching, an impression reinforced by activists. Francis himself added to the confusion at times through off-the-cuff comments and his clumsy use of wrong-sex pronouns for transgender-identified persons.
After his death, Francis’s past meetings were exploited to suggest he had set in motion an irreversible process that would culminate in changing Catholic teaching on sexuality. Even the pope’s unwillingness to change Catholic teaching on homosexuality has been presented as merely a question of timing, because, as Fr. James Martin, S.J., told ABC News, “there are some places in the Church that aren’t ready for . . . same-sex relations.”
Second, omissions by Pope Francis created ambiguity, confusion, and even pain. He failed to correct misrepresentations of his conversations, even when these misrepresentations were used to undermine Church teaching. Despite repeated public meetings with transgender-identifying persons, including a meeting with the co-director of a U.S. gender clinic, he has never publicly acknowledged the grievous medical harm such gender clinicians have inflicted on vulnerable young people. Where were the photo ops with de-transitioners who lost their breasts or their fertility? Where was the warm embrace for mothers and fathers whose children are still caught in the grips of gender madness? He also failed to publicly encourage same-sex-attracted Catholics committed to chastity. These omissions left these faithful Catholics, already suffering for their fidelity to the truth, bereft of the Holy Father’s comfort and support.
Third, Francis’s inconsistent approach toward pastoral care in matters of identity and sexuality created a culture of ambiguity and confusion. Although Dignitas Infinita (DDF 2024) declared that “any sex change” interventions violate human dignity, Cardinal Fernández “clarified” Dignitas Infinita in a recent speech, seeming to permit such interventions when the person suffers “severe” gender dysphoria or “suicidality.” In a matter of months, the DDF under Francis moved from acknowledging the intrinsic evil of repudiating God’s gift of sexual identity to permitting an evil (“sex change interventions,” “gender transition”), justified by misguided “compassion.” But authentic compassion is always aligned with the truth. Gender ideology leads vulnerable persons toward moral, spiritual, and physical harm, and farther from Christ.
We are indeed in an anthropological revolution, one that subverts the truth and leads persons away from Jesus and toward harm. So what now? Does the Church have the will to confront this revolution? Do the cardinal-electors have the will to select a pope who will uphold the truth about God and the truth about us?
As the cardinals take stock of the state of the Church today, they might consider the following. Our next pope should convey the Church’s beautiful teaching about the human person and human sexuality, clearly and persuasively, emphasizing that these foundational teachings provide the stability necessary for human flourishing. The pope must be willing to acknowledge the brutality and futility of “gender transition,” the disfiguring interventions that alter the body’s appearance and function in a vain attempt to reject one’s sex.
This moment requires realism; the stakes are high. The core of “transgender” identification is the rejection of the givenness of creation, including sex. (“Male and female He created them.”) There can be no compromise. Pastoral care must be grounded in the truth of our given identities, embodied male or female from conception. Pastoral care also must recognize that affirming false identity beliefs leads to suffering, including the collateral damage to others who are compelled to affirm the lies of gender ideology.
The next pope can take concrete steps to communicate the truth about the human person effectively and persuasively. First, use language that reflects reality and affirms the truth. Avoid the language of gender ideology—ideological terms like “transwoman” or “cisgender”—and the misuse of language, for example, pronouns that misrepresent a person’s sex. Terms such as “transgender people” or “LGBTQ people,” intended to be inclusive, instead validate an erroneous anthropology that defines people by sexual desire or felt “identity,” and suggests that a different set of moral teachings apply. The Church must communicate the truth that human beings are much more than their desires, including sexual desires. A desire that is disordered (meaning not ordered toward the good) does not make a person disordered. But unless we can acknowledge that some desires are not ordered toward God, we cannot take action to order our lives toward God. This counter-cultural message requires a pope who is courageous, kind, and an effective communicator.
Finally, the Church faces continued efforts to “queer” its theology. In Germany, for example, the episcopal conference approved documents from their “Synodal Way” that call for rethinking Christian anthropology and including transgender-identified persons in ordained ministries. The Church must speak with authority on this issue, perhaps confronting this anthropological revolution with an encyclical on gender ideology, as Cardinal Eijk previously suggested. This encyclical would give clergy, educators, parents, and others the courage to share the Church’s teaching, confident that Catholic teaching illuminates the way to happiness.
“When people ask the Church the questions raised by their consciences, when the faithful in the Church turn to their Bishops and Pastors, the Church’s reply contains the voice of Jesus Christ, the voice of the truth about good and evil. In the words spoken by the Church there resounds, in people’s inmost being, the voice of God who ‘alone is good’ (cf. Mt 19:17), who alone ‘is love’ (1 Jn 4:8, 16).” (Veritatis Splendor 117)
Theresa Farnan is a fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center; Mary Hasson is an EPPC senior fellow. Together they lead the Center’s Person and Identity Project.
On the Work of Restoring Credibility
by Rev. William Clare
Among the most unfortunate features of the Francis pontificate was its willingness to ignore the fallout of a two-decades long sexual abuse crisis in the Church while preserving characters like Marko Rupnik and Gustavo Zanchetta. That spectacle reached its apogee last fall when the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith nullified the effort of the Secretariat of State to reverse the laicization of another disgraced former priest, Ariel Alberto Principi. This was especially perplexing because the same pontificate promulgated the document Vos Estis Lux Mundi, which established norms regarding allegations of sexual misconduct against bishops.
These issues point to problems at the heart of the Francis pontificate that must be addressed by the cardinals whose assembly in Rome now has the governance and spiritual well-being of the universal Church in its hands.
While the bewildering activity around those clergy prominently accused of and found to have committed sexual misconduct is a source of scandal and diminished credibility, it is not the only one.
In the area of governance, the cardinal-electors must consider the massive financial crisis facing the Holy See, the unresolved economic reform of its institutions, the ineffective reform of the Roman Curia, and the improvised rule by personal fiat that characterized much of the last pontificate. A good dissertation for a budding canonist would be the evolution of the motu proprio as a governance tool from 2013 to 2025. All these matters point to a pontificate that, as many others have said, depended deeply on the personal will of the pope more than an orderly and prudent exercise of papal authority.
There are historical moments when the Church needs to adjust how she governs and expresses herself, but those call for a spirit of clarity, not confusion. In the current moment, the former is in short supply, while the latter overflows. One needs to look no further than the most recent developments in the Becciu affair to see that.
But even more important than issues facing the Church’s governance is the confusion over what precisely the Church believes, how and what she teaches, and how she worships the one, true God. The synodal process undertaken over the past decade did, arguably, have merits. It offered a forum to a new range of voices and showed that it was possible for local churches to engage in a dynamic conversation with the universal Church. At the same time, while the synodal process seemed to promise open discussion of questions that had been settled, those same questions were silenced by papal mandate. This leads to a further question: Should they have been disinterred and re-opened in the first place?
Then there were the Amoris wars, an impulsive edit of the Church’s teaching on capital punishment, the continued struggle between liturgical camps, and the Fiducia Supplicans debacle. In the absence of clarity and continuity, core Church doctrines inevitably come under pressure. And it was all avoidable.
Pope Francis’s great witness of service to the poor needs to continue in the next pontificate. His emphasis on the importance of discernment was a powerful example of the spiritual resources found within the Christian tradition. His focus on the care of creation was a welcome advance in the line of Catholic social teaching. And, while not as prolonged as John Paul II’s final decline, Francis’s willingness to remain in the public eye as his health failed was a valuable reminder of our duty to the sick and dying.
All that said, the next pope will find himself at the helm of Peter’s barque with a governance problem on the bow and a doctrinal crisis at his stern. So what now? Every past set of papal electors has been faced with the task of attempting to “accept the interior movements of the Holy Spirit” (Universi Dominici Gregis); but history is equally clear that they have not always succeeded. As the current electors consider their task, they might find wisdom in the insights of St. Augustine as he reflected on his own ministry as a bishop:
The turbulent have to be corrected, the faint-hearted cheered up, the weak supported; the gospel’s opponents need to be refuted, its insidious enemies guarded against; the unlearned need to be taught, the indolent stirred up, the argumentative checked; the proud must be put in their place, the desperate set on their feet, those engaged in quarrels reconciled; the needy have to be helped, the oppressed to be liberated, the good to be given your backing, the bad to be tolerated; all must be loved. (Sermon 340)
Augustine’s brief exposition of the bishop’s responsibilities offers a way to think about the next bishop of Rome with appropriate candor. The Roman pontiff is called to be a guarantor of Catholic unity. Fulfilling that responsibility is essential to the life of the Church.
The source of credibility for the next Roman pontiff can be found in another passage from that same sermon of Augustine: “For you I am a bishop, with you, after all, I am a Christian. The first is the name of an office undertaken, the second a name of grace; that one means danger, this one salvation.” For every bishop, including the one responsible for the see of Rome, credibility rises and falls on the proclamation of Jesus Christ and the perennial truths of the Christian tradition.
The danger, even for a pope, is in forgetting that.
Rev. William Clare is a religious priest writing from the United States.
Larry Chapp’s Roman Diary—May 3
If you want to get a snapshot of what the central issue of the coming conclave ought to be, look no further than the recent article by Fr. Bryan Massingale in the Jesuit journal America. Entitled “Pope Francis and the future of Catholic moral theology,” it is riddled with all of the usual buzzwords and dog whistles favored by Catholic progressives. Terms and phrases like “radical inclusion,” and “complex concrete circumstances,” are tossed around as if they are new ideas when in point of fact their intellectual pedigree is grounded in the same stale bromides of the proportionalist moral lexicon that goes back at least to the sixties.
As Fr. Massingale presents it, they are new ideas and part of the revolutionary and “creative” repositioning of moral theology in the thought of Pope Francis. Yet, and despite their revolutionary character, he states that the new ideas are thoroughly traditional since they harken us back to the original message of Christ of a radical love of our neighbor. Implicit in this claim, of course, is the question begging assumption that “radical love of neighbor” means moving away from a morality of judgmentalism and binding, one-size-fits-all universal norms.
By contrast he portrays the new approach of Pope Francis as focusing on “persons” in all of their unique circumstances rather than “doctrines” that, allegedly, fail to approach persons in a loving manner since they impose upon the fluid and complex situation of real people an overlay of ecclesial rules that are unbending. He refers to Pope Francis in this line of thinking as standing in contrast to his immediate predecessors who insisted upon the importance of binding universal moral norms and who created a climate of repressive fear where theologians such as himself felt constrained by an overweening authority that demanded strict obedience.
This latter claim is the usual boilerplate nonsense of the left that the previous papacies imposed upon the Church a stifling repression of free academic discourse. But this is risible to anyone who was involved in the Catholic academic guild under those pontificates since our “lived experience” in our “complex circumstances” was the tyranny of Catholic liberals who continued to dominate the landscape of Catholic theology departments. And when one attended theological conferences such as the annual meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA), what one encountered was the near hegemony of liberal voices that evinced no fear of ecclesial reprisal for their dissenting views.
To be sure, the Vatican under John Paul did censure a handful of theologians, but this only increased their popularity and influence in the allegedly repressed Catholic academic guild. A case in point was the Jesuit theologian Fr. Roger Haight whose 1999 book Jesus Symbol of God argued for the non-exclusivity of Christ and championed the claims of the school of religious pluralism that other “savior figures” from other religions were also pathways to God. But his censure did not stop the academic guild from lavishing him with prizes and honors, and he was portrayed as a kind of martyr to academic freedom.
Ignored by Massingale in his attempts at a revisionist narrative of rampant oppression is that cases like Haight’s were the exception and not the rule. He also conveniently ignores the fact that Pope Francis engaged in his own form of censorious “oppression” when he summarily dismissed without any academic due process most of the very distinguished faculty at the John Paul Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Rome. The only explanation given for this purging of theologians faithful to the teachings of John Paul was a simple, vague statement about wanting to take the Institute in a “new direction.” Pope Francis made a similar move in his “reform” of the Pontifical Academy for Life.
Massingale’s hagiographic elevation of Francis is therefore grounded in a false narrative that contrasts the “open-minded” approach of Francis to that of his closed-minded and authoritarian predecessors. It is a cartoonish caricature but it serves a powerful rhetorical purpose in the cause of electing as the next pope someone who will carry forward the allegedly more inclusive approach of Francis.
But Francis was not the champion of total parrhesia and inclusion that this narrative demands. Despite the late pope’s constant refrain of “Todos! Todos!” it was very clear that for his pontificate the “Todos” did not include traditionalist voices who were summarily kicked to the curb by Traditionis Custodes and its draconian restrictions on liturgical pluralism. In this case “parrhesia” seems to mean open-ended freedom to discuss anything so long as those discussions are grounded in more liberal presumptions. Traditionalist voices were excluded as we can see as well in the Synod on Synodality where Fr. James Martin and his “Outreach” ministry were valorized while the leaders of Courage International were summarily ignored and thus sent to the peripheries.
And that brings me back to Fr. Massingale’s essay. Laced throughout the article are constant references to the changed approach to “LGBTQ persons” and to needed changes in Catholic sexual morality in general. As is so typical of articles like this one, the goal of changing Church teaching on sexual morality seems to be the deeper agenda in play. However, the claim that all he wants is a more open discussion on these matters needs to be placed in historical context. Those of us old enough to have lived through the post–Vatican II turmoil know well what such calls for “dialogue” really mean. What they mean is better characterized as, “let’s chat this to death in order to create the illusion that these doctrines are still up for grabs, and then, once we are in power, all ‘dialogue’ will cease.”
This bait-and-switch strategy is therefore not a new one and what is at stake in the next conclave is whether the assembled cardinals will take the bait. My fear is that they will, and the muddying of the Church’s moral teachings, and the repudiation by way of caricature of Veritatis Splendor will continue.
What is at stake in this return of the strong proportionalist gods is nothing short of the binding nature of the moral commandments of Scripture. The Bible’s entire moral pedagogy is structured around the concept that there is a “divine law” that God has given to us as a gift and not a burden. Therefore, the not-so-subtle recasting of this moral pedagogy as burdensome requires a further distortion in the various mischaracterizations of the moral message of Christ as reductive to a vague set of ideas centered on inclusion. But these revisionist recastings of Christ are deeply anachronistic. They ignore his Judaic moral context—a context that Jesus not only accepted but made even more radical in its binding nature—and they turn Jesus into a first-century champion of rainbow liberation from that awful “law.”
All of this must be resisted in the coming conclave. The essence of biblical morality is at stake and one can only hope that the assembled cardinals will see this.
Larry Chapp, a retired professor of theology at De Sales University in Allentown, Pennsylvania, is the host of the Gaudium et Spes 22 podcast and the co-founder, with his wife Carmina, of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania.
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