“I am not afraid to say that the Church will always have to confront ideological lies. Today she must address gender ideology,” which St. John Paul referred to as “a new ideology of evil," the Cardinal writes.

“Moreover, gender, the product of reflection by American structuralists, is a deformed child of Marxist thinking. Gender ideology conveys a crude lie, since the reality of the human being as man and woman is denied. The lobbies and the feminist movements promote it with violence. It has rapidly been transformed in a battle against the social order and its values. Its objective does not stop just at the deconstruction of the [human] subject; it is interested above all in the deconstruction of the social order.”

Gender ideology is all about introducing suspicion of heterosexuality, he says. “For [proponents of] gender [theory] it is necessary to abolish Christian civilization and construct a new world.”

He goes on to cite another architect of deconstruction, Margaret Sanger, who engaged in efforts aimed at the moral deconstruction of the West. Sanger believed a woman must be able to control her body and sexuality and to enjoy the freedom of her body and its rights by doing whatever she likes with it. She must be free to choose whether or not to become a mother, Sanger professed, and every child has to be wanted and planned. She believed that no religious morality, no dogma, or cultural tradition should prevent women from achieving their goals and having access to contraception and abortion.

The radical feminist Simone de Beauvoir takes it a step further. “One is not born a woman, one becomes so,” she once asserted. A woman only becomes a wife and mother if she is passive and submits to tradition.

“This is what theoreticians of gender studies call the stereotype or the repressive social construct that must be ‘deconstructed’,” the Cardinal continues. “Conversely, if a woman is committed to constructing herself in a way that is radically autonomous with respect to others and to God, she ‘liberates’ herself; the woman becomes herself and lives for herself. She can thus own herself and control her destiny.”

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI called de Beauvoir’s belief that women are not born women, but become women, “the foundation for what is put forward today under the term ‘gender’ as a new philosophy of sexuality. . . . The words of the creation account: ‘male and female he created them’ no longer apply. No, what apples now is this: it was not God who created them male and female – hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves. . . .The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned.”

It is unfortunate that so many women today have fallen for these “ideological lies” which are promulgated by powerful special-interest groups such as Planned Parenthood and the bullying tactics of homosexual activist organizations intent on stamping out all opposition to their points-of-view. This new social construct of gender ideology may have brought about an improvement in the living conditions of select minority groups such as transgenders, but it has ultimately failed us all by eliminating the glue that has long held together the moral fabric of our world – love of neighbor.

When we pursue our own personal autonomy to the point of endangering critical social institutions such as the family, which decades of research has found to be the safest place for children to be raised by their biological parents, we are not acting for the good of all but for ourselves alone.

Even worse, when women in particular strip themselves of their inherent dignity and the gifts with which they are endowed by virtue of their gender, they strip the world of the feminine genius which is the source of the receptive, generous, and nurturing love that makes it human.

As Johnnette Benkovic teaches in the Women of Grace® Foundational Study, even those women who are not physical mothers bring these vital assets into our world. Quoting Edith Stein, she writes, “’Woman naturally seeks to embrace that which is living, personal, and whole. To cherish, guard, protect, nourish and advance growth is her natural maternal yearning’. Everything about woman is ordered to this end. Her body, her psyche, and her soul equip her to be a nurturing influence in family life, in professional life, through her religious vocation, and in the world at large.”

Who would want to trade this magnificent inheritance for a mere social construct?

The good news is that our true gender identity is safely tucked into our chromosomes and, thankfully, DNA doesn’t lie.

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