John L. Allen Jr. is the editor of Crux, specializing in coverage of the Vatican and the Catholic Church.
He has written nine books on the Vatican and Catholic affairs, and also is a popular speaker on Catholicism both in the United States and internationally.
The London Tablet has called John “the most authoritative writer on Vatican affairs in the English language,” and renowned papal biographer George Weigel has called him “the best Anglophone Vatican reporter ever.” When John was called upon to put the first question to Pope Benedict XVI aboard the papal plane en route to the United States in April 2008, the Vatican spokesman said to the pope: “Holy Father, this man needs no introduction.”
ROME - Most of the time when Pope Francis speaks on a social or political concern, one understands immediately what he’s talking about. When the pontiff addresses poverty, for instance, or threats to the environment, or a “throw-away culture” that disregards the unborn, there aren’t many hoops to jump through to get the point.
Not so, however, when Francis addresses another frequent hobby horse: “Gender theory.” Though that term has been in use in Vatican circles for at least the last quarter-century, reaching back to the era of St. Pope John Paul II, concern over it has intensified on Francis’s watch.
In a nutshell, it refers to theories which posit that male/female identities are not given in nature but rather socially and culturally constructed, and therefore can be revised based on one’s personal desires.
In an October 2015 general audience, Francis warned that with the rise of gender theory, “we risk going backward,” saying it “drains the world of affection and obscures the heavens of hope.” A year later, while returning to Rome after a trip to Georgia and Azerbaijan, Francis complained of what he called “indoctrination in gender theory” occurring in schools around the world.
Last October, in a session with the Pontifical Academy for Life, the pontiff said the “recently introduced hypothesis” of gender theory is “not fair,” and warned that it’s “likely to dismantle the source of energy that nourishes the alliance of man and woman and makes it creative and fruitful.”
Francis clearly thinks there’s something worrying, and if there’s one thing Rome as a company town knows how to do, it’s to pick up on it when the boss is worried. Thus it’s little surprise that a March 12-13 conference at Rome’s Opus Dei-run Santa Croce University on “The Right to Education and to Teaching” included a paper on gender theory, during a panel chaired by German Archbishop Georg Gänswein, the closest aide to Pope emeritus Benedict XVI and the Prefect of the Papal Household for Francis.
In the wake of the presentation, two things seemed clear. The first is that it was a deft presentation of the state of affairs in Europe, and the Church’s current thinking about it. The second was that for the reflection about gender theory to go forward, the conversation eventually may need to be broadened. Read more via Crux