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Moral theologian: Benedict XVI called gender ideology ‘the ultimate rebellion against God’ – LifeSite

FRONT ROYAL, Virginia (LifeSiteNews) — Dr. John Haas, a moral theologian and former member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, revealed in a May 13 commencement speech given at Christendom College that in 2014, then-retired Pope Benedict XVI told him in a private conversation in the Vatican that “the next great challenge the Church is going to face is gender ideology, and it will be the ultimate rebellion against God the Creator.”

Speaking to the 114 graduates of Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia, Haas admitted that he was “surprised” by Pope Benedict’s unsolicited comment, and added that he now sees Benedict “was prophetic. We have been hit with a tsunami of transgender ideology.”

As an example, the former president of the National Bioethics Center mentioned that “Catholic health care institutions are being sued because they refuse to perform mutilating surgeries on men who want to be surgically altered to look like women or women who want to appear as men. Catholic academic institutions are also being sued and attacked as they simply try to continue to give witness to the truth of their students being either male or female.”

Haas received on this occasion from Christendom College the St. Thomas More medal for Defense of the Faith and Holy Mother Church.

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The son of pastor Artur Pawlowski could be facing massive fines and jail time after he preached Bible verses outside a drag queen story time held at a public library over the weekend.

Nathaniel Pawlowski was detained and ticketed on Saturday by Calgary Police Service (CPS) because he was preaching too “close” to the drag event, in an apparent violation of a new and oppressive bylaw.

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Pawlowski said that he was outside the event to “preach, read the Bible and just speak.” 

Video of the incident shows Pawlowski along with his friend Deklan Friesen speaking to a crowd outside the library.

Calgary City Council last month passed a new “Safe and Inclusive Access Bylaw” that disallows “specified protests” both inside and outside all city-owned and affiliated public buildings. Mayor Jyoti Gondek put her full support behind the buffer zone bylaw.

Please tell Mayor Gondek that the bylaw violating Charter freedoms is both unjust and absurd

The bylaw means pastors or concerned parents protesting pro-LGBT events at public buildings are barred from getting within 100 meters of any such location.

Top constitutional lawyer John Carpay recently blasted Calgary City Council for going to “war” against Canadians’ freedoms by using bylaws to target people’s ability to protest events at public facilities, including drag queen performance directed at children. 

In an opinion piece published on March 17 in the Western Standard, Carpay said “freedom of expression is meaningless if citizens are only allowed to say what’s approved by the government, or if expression is banished from public spaces.” 

Pawlowski noted that his ticket has no penalty listed yet, as police must “review the evidence on me and that they will be stopping by my home to issue charges.”  

His ticket does have a mandatory court appearance date. Each charge under Calgary’s bylaw carries a maximum fine of up to $10,000 and up to a year in jail.

SIGN: Nathaniel Pawlowski MUST NOT be fined or jailed for protecting kids from Drag Queens 

Pawlowski had asked the police officers if they would also be enforcing “the same law on to the other side with the Antifa protesters”, but nobody was served a ticket except for he and Friesen.

In June 2022, Calgary City Council, under its left-leaning Mayor Jyoti Gondek, amended the city’s bylaws to “specifically prohibit insulting or demeaning behavior, including unwanted sexual advances, or harassing anyone on the basis of age, race, sexual orientation, disability, gender, gender identity or gender expression, among others.” 

In February, Gondek vowed to use the bylaw to go after drag queen story hour protesters after some of the events were postponed by pro-family objectors. 

In early March, fulfilling her promise, Calgary City Council then passed the bylaw that banned protesting against drag queen story hours or any other “LGBTQ” events held at public facilities. 

SIGN: Nathaniel Pawlowski MUST NOT be fined or jailed for protecting kids from Drag Queens 

Carpay noted that while there are limits to free speech,  “Canadians have every right to express their views in public places, regardless of the content of the expression.” 

He also wrote how a 1992 Supreme Court of Canada decision in R. v. Zundel “explained all communications which convey or attempt to convey meaning are protected by the Charter [of Rights and Freedoms], unless the physical form by which the communication is made (for example, a violent act) excludes protection.” 

“The purpose of the Charter’s free expression guarantee is to promote truth, self-fulfillment, and political and social participation. That purpose extends to the protection of minority beliefs which the majority regards as wrong or false,” wrote Carpay. 

According to Carpay, Gondek seems to “believe it is wrong or false to oppose drag queen story readings in public libraries.” 

“She is entitled to express her views, but not to impose her views on others by effectively banning peaceful public protests through a so-called ‘Safe and Inclusive Access’ bylaw,” noted Carpay. 

There exists a “freedom of expression” which includes the “right” to choose “high-visibility locations to hold up signs or banners, sing or chant, hand out literature, gather signatures on a petition, and have a speaker get up on her soapbox,” continued the lawyer. 

“Protests are often held at the locations where injustices (or perceived injustices) are actually occurring,” he added. 

Christian pastor Derek Reimer was jailed and charged in early March for protesting a children’s drag queen story hour at a public library in Calgary.  

Carpay wrote that the city council’s use of “coercive power to relegate peaceful protesters to obscure locations where they cannot be seen or heard,” amounts to “crushing a fundamental Charter freedom on which our democracy depends.” 

“The point of protests is to be seen and heard,” wrote Carpay. 

Carpay noted that being forced to stand 100 meters away from high-visibility and high-traffic areas “reduces freedom of expression to near irrelevance.” 

“Protecting entrances from obstruction is already taken care of by the Criminal Code, and does not require a bylaw that imposes up to $10,000 in fines and up to a year in jail for peacefully protesting less than the length of four swimming pools away from an entrance,” charged Carpay. 

According to Carpay, the Charter’s protection for free speech applies to those at the receiving end of a person speaking out.  

“Potential listeners who have the right to hear diverse points of view, and to decide for themselves what is true and false rather than having Mayor Gondek decide on their behalf,” said Carpay. 

“Calgary’s ‘Safe and Inclusive Access’ bylaw violates the rights of all Calgarians, speakers and listeners, and attacks diversity of thought and belief.” 

Carpay noted that “repressive regimes always take great pains to ensure their subjects are kept ‘safe’ from ideas which the regime believes to be wrong or false.” 

“In the past – and still today – those living in communist North Korea, national socialist Germany, theocratic Iran, Putin’s Russia, communist China and many other places have been kept very safe from ideas that the regime dislikes,” wrote Carpay.  

Carpay noted that in a “free society,” there is no way everyone can be “safe” from hearing one’s opposing views. 

“The ‘safety’ which woke activists on Calgary City Council are promising is attractive to those who support children being exposed to drag queens at public libraries,” wrote Carpay.

“But beware of the erosion of freedom, because the demons of censorship cannot be controlled after their release.” 

In addition to Carpay, the Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF) has also objected to the new bylaw, and has vowed to commence a legal challenge against the “unconstitutional” policy. 

SIGN: Nathaniel Pawlowski MUST NOT be fined or jailed for protecting kids from Drag Queens

MORE INFORMATION: 

Pastor Artur Pawlowski’s son detained in Calgary for preaching against drag show – LifeSiteNews

Canadian constitutional lawyer rips Calgary law banning drag queen story hour protests – LifeSiteNews

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In his last Christmas address to the Roman Curia as acting pope in 2012, Benedict XVI himself had elaborated on the dangers of the gender theory. Referring to the famous quote of French author Simone de Beauvoir, “one is not born a woman, one becomes so,” the pope then explained that “these words lay the foundation for what is put forward today under the term ‘gender’ as a new philosophy of sexuality.”

Further expounding on this destructive theory, the pontiff went on to say: “According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society.”

For him, the “profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it” is “obvious.”

Pope Benedict then reminded his audience of the biblical creation account, according to which “being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God.”

But today’s gender theory rejects this plan. Benedict continued by saying: “Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will.” “From now on,” he added, “there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be.”

This new concept has very destructive consequences for the family, the late pope explained. “If there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation,” Pope Benedict expounded, “then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation. Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him.”

In summary, the rejection of God as Creator leads to the loss of the human dignity. “The defence of the family is about man himself,” according to the pope. “And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.”

Only a few months after this Christmas address, in February of 2013, Pope Benedict XVI resigned the papacy.

To return to Dr. Haas’ own commencement address on the topic of transgenderism, the moral theologian and father of nine children quoted the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et spes: “When the Creator is forgotten, the creature itself grows unintelligible.” Comments Haas:

In our day, the Creator has been forgotten, and we now live in a world which is simply unintelligible. We no longer know what a man is or what a woman is. We no longer know what marriage is, what a family is. If we no longer know what such concrete realities are, how will we possibly be able to conceive abstract realities such as justice, fortitude, or charity? When the Creator is forgotten, the creature itself becomes unintelligible.

Therefore, Haas called upon the graduates of Christendom College to oppose this “evil generation,” and not only that, but also to help build a “new Christianity.” Quoting from St. Peter in Acts – “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation!” – Dr. Haas told the young graduates: “ I call on you to heed the apostle’s call but to extend it. Save yourselves from this corrupt generation so that in the years to come you can work to save this corrupt generation.”

As examples of this current “corrupt generation,” the moral theologian mentioned “abortion, same-sex marriage, physician assisted suicide,” and “transgender ideology,” all of which are “attacks on the very image of God.” “Could the world in which you are entering as college graduates be more disordered and confused?” Haas asked.

“Your task will be to help re-order the world,” he continued. “It will be your task to work to bring it once more into alignment with what God created it to be.” Such a “forging of a new Christian society,” he expounded, will “be no easy task,” and it will “require sacrifice, the enduring of social opprobrium, perhaps even martyrdom in some fashion or another.”

Dr. John Haas is a senior fellow and president emeritus of The National Catholic Bioethics Center, holding a doctorate in moral theology from the Catholic University of America and a licentiate in moral theology from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Dr. Haas was appointed to the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life by Pope Benedict XVI. In 1996 Dr. Haas edited the book “Crisis of Conscience,” which included an essay written by Pope Benedict XVI.

Dr. Maike Hickson was born and raised in Germany. She holds a PhD from the University of Hannover, Germany, after having written in Switzerland her doctoral dissertation on the history of Swiss intellectuals before and during World War II. She now lives in the U.S. and is married to Dr. Robert Hickson, and they have been blessed with two beautiful children. She is a happy housewife who likes to write articles when time permits.

Dr. Hickson published in 2014 a Festschrift, a collection of some thirty essays written by thoughtful authors in honor of her husband upon his 70th birthday, which is entitled A Catholic Witness in Our Time.

Hickson has closely followed the papacy of Pope Francis and the developments in the Catholic Church in Germany, and she has been writing articles on religion and politics for U.S. and European publications and websites such as LifeSiteNews, OnePeterFive, The Wanderer, Rorate Caeli, Catholicism.org, Catholic Family News, Christian Order, Notizie Pro-Vita, Corrispondenza Romana, Katholisches.info, Der Dreizehnte,  Zeit-Fragen, and Westfalen-Blatt.

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