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The Conscience of the Catholic Church
Anne Barrett Doyle is a devoted mother, practicing Catholic, and one of the fiercest crusaders against clergy sex abuse. Feb 26, 2021
“Are you Catholic?” Anne Barrett Doyle smiled at me expectantly with kind, sea-green eyes. It was months before the pandemic hit, and Barrett Doyle had invited me over to the Boston loft she and her husband moved into after the last of their four kids left for college. A crucifix hung on the wall, and a Jesus statuette prayed from a wooden desk. Several Bibles lined the bookshelf. We sat side by side on a plush beige couch. Barrett Doyle, small and soft-spoken, with shoulder-length auburn hair and rosy cheeks, folded her hands politely and crossed her ankles.
Trans-sexuality, cross-dressing,” and seeking “
gender identity
development,” i.e., physical identity through radical surgeries, and hormone treatment; and, more broadly, “gender atypicality” that includes “myriad subcultural expressions of self-selecting gender,” and “intersectionality” with other “interdependence” movements, i.e., feminism, homosexuality.
[1] The idea of transgenderism has its roots in the primordial rebellion of humankind to the creation order of God.
Ancient pagan rituals would have included some aspects of transgender practice. More currently, social anarchists such as the otherwise brilliant French social critic, Michael Foucault, argued that Christianity, in particular, has leveraged its cultural “powers” (a recurring them with Foucault) to repress human sexual expression. Foucault taught that gender is a social construct, not a biological fact. The absurdity of such thinking was largely unchallenged in the 1960s and 70s when
He was rather confused and asked, Does it talk back? She said, Yes. What does it say to you? She said, The tree says to me I am here. I am here. And I am alive. I am eternally alive. As Christians believing in the resurrection, we can look at the tree of the cross and we can say, I shall not be conquered. I believe in eternal life. We can look suffering and death in the eye and say, “I am alive. I am eternally alive.” Scripture offers us powerful support when it comes to pain and suffering.