Pope Francis issued a warning this Friday (1st) against the supposed evils of gender studies, stating that the Catholic Church will conduct studies on the topic.
With that, the pontiff called the theory a “horrible ideology” that threatens humanity.
In a speech to participants at a Vatican conference on the role of men and women according to Christian teachings, Francis said “gender ideology” is a threat because it seeks to erase the difference between the sexes.
“I asked for studies to be conducted on this horrible ideology of our times, which cancels differences,” the pope said. “Canceling differences means canceling humanity. Man and woman, however, live in a fruitful tension.”
It is worth remembering that the expression “gender ideology” is not recognized in the academic world and is used by conservative groups, many of them religious, opposed to gender studies initiated in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and Europe — which theorize the difference between biological sex and gender.
For these scholars, being a man or a woman does not depend only on genitalia or chromosomes, but on cultural and behavioral patterns. Such patterns, according to theorists in the field, are acquired in life in society.
Conservative groups believe that the conclusions of these studies on gender have not received validation from the exact and biological sciences.
