Catholic Hospitals Must Protect Children from Gender Ideology

By Bishop James D. Conley Before Christianity came on the scene, ancient Greek and Roman pagans did not consider children to be fully human persons like adults. Indeed, it is not too strong to say that Christianity introduced the concept of children that we have today, in which we give children more concern than adults owing to their vulnerability. This was truly a revolutionary concept. Such a view comes directly from the commands of Christ, whose very strong view was also extremely counter-cultural. When the disciples tried to stop children from engaging with Jesus, he sternly rebuked them saying that the Kingdom of God belonged to the little children. Indeed, our Lord reverses the adult-versus-child priority, saying directly that adults must become like little children. And he reserves the harshest language of all for those who harm children: saying that it would be better if they were drowned in the sea with a millstone hung around their neck. It is from this vision of little children that the Church had and continues to have its strong response to abortion and infanticide. It is this vision that makes the sex abuse crisis so reprehensible and the Church's aggressive reaction to it in the last two decades an imperative. It is also from this vision that the Church criticizes the brutal manipulation of children when it comes to sex and gender. Perhaps it should not come as a surprise that as the voice of Christianity fades from the public sphere, we see a repaganized culture using children as experimental subjects - poisoning them with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and mutilating them with ghastly surgeries that forever alter their bodies. God creates human beings male and female, along with various ways to express that maleness and femaleness. Joan of Arc, leading armies in battle, was just as much of a woman as any contemporary ballerina. A seminarian, wearing cassock and singing in a choir, is just as much of a man as any contemporary football player. It is bizarre and wrong, however, to pretend that men and women, boys and girls, are not bound by given male or female biological realities. And it is particularly heinous to harm children with drugs and surgeries in attempting to escape from these realities. Pope Francis, while rightly focusing on pastoral care for children and others with sex and gender confusion, also rightly described gender ideology, which leads to poisoning and mutilating our children, as "evil." Just a few months ago, the Holy Father called it the "ugliest danger" of our time. Mindful of these realities, individual Catholics and Catholic institutions must resist gender ideology - particularly as it affects young people - whenever we find it. Unfortunately, and this was tragically true of the sex-abuse crisis as well, preliminary investigations have found these evil and ugly practices present in the Church - including in some of our Catholic hospitals. A group called "Stop the Harm" has compiled a database from publicly available hospital records showing nearly 14,000 treatments related to sex changes that were delivered to minor children in the U.S. - and nearly 150 Catholic hospitals apparently had codes for procedures suggesting they were involved. Catholic hospitals seemingly prescribed both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones - and not a few even performed mutilating surgeries on children. I am grateful to say that there was no evidence that anything like this is happening within Catholic health care institutions in the Diocese of Lincoln, but as someone with pastoral leadership roles within the Catholic Medical Association and the Catholic Health Care Leadership Alliance - and as a follower of Christ's command to give special priority to children - I cannot stand by in silence, knowing that Catholic institutions do this to the most vulnerable in the Church's name. It should be noted that some of the Catholic hospitals on the list appear because of one-offs or single-digit counts....