Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco has publicly denounced the spread of “gender ideology” saying it not only threatens society, but the very foundation of the church’s faith.

Religion News Service is reporting on a presentation made by Archbishop Cordileone last week at the Sacra Liturgia conference in Manhattan in which he condemned the new trend toward assigning one’s own gender.

“The clear biological fact is that a human being is born either male or female. Yet now we have the idea gaining acceptance that biological sex and one’s personal gender identity can be at variance with each other, with more and more gender identities being invented.”

He went on to cite one major university that advertised housing for 14 different gender identities. “I’m sure even more will be invented as time goes on,” he said to a round of laughter.

His comments were made at the height of the debate last week over Bruce Jenner’s “coming out” as a woman which occurred when he posed on the cover of Vanity Fair in women’s lingerie.

Cordileone went on to say that gender ideology poses not only a threat to society, but also to the faith. That’s because Christianity is based on what the Archbishop explained as the biological reality of the God-given “complementarity” of the male-female relationship.

“This is because God has used marriage as the primary sacred sign of our relationship with him. . . It’s all the story of a marriage. God’s marriage covenant with Israel is fulfilled in the blood of Christ on the cross, establishing the new and eternal covenant between him, the bridegroom, and his bride, the church. When the culture can no longer apprehend those natural truths, then the very foundation of our teaching evaporates and nothing we have to offer will make sense.”

The inevitable result, he said, “is a reversion to the paganism of old, but with unique, postmodern variations on its themes, such as the practice of child sacrifice, the worship of feminine deities or the cult of priestesses.”

As evidence, he cited a recent Gallup survey which found that Americans are becoming much more liberal on social issues, with 63 percent now approving same-sex marriage, 68 percent approving sex outside marriage, and 64 percent approving the use of human embryonic stem cells. Even more concerning, a record 16 percent now believe polygamy is okay, which represents an increase of nine percentage points since the last time this question was polled in 2001.

Archbishop Cordileone continues to be under fire in his own Archdiocese for insisting that teachers in San Francisco’s Catholic schools adhere to Church teaching on matters of morality in their public lives so as to avoid causing scandal among the student population.

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