(LifeSiteNews) — A new Connecticut archbishop who supports “female deacons” has endorsed using gender-confused individuals’ chosen names and pronouns that contradict their sex.
Archbishop Christopher Coyne of Hartford, who assumed leadership of the archdiocese on Wednesday after the resignation of Archbishop Leonard Blair, told Catholic News Agency (CNA) last week that he would use a “transgender” person’s non-biological name to begin a conversation with him or her.
CNA noted that Coyne told Connecticut Public Radio in April, “Biology is biology. You’re either XX or XY. That’s a scientific fact.”
The archbishop told CNA, however, that he would still accept a gender-confused person’s presented “gender.”
“It doesn’t cost me anything to accept them as they’re presenting themselves, as a brother or a sister, or whatever gender they’re asking me to refer to them as,” he said. “If they’d like to be referred to by this name or this pronoun, it doesn’t cost me anything to say, ‘Okay,’ and then begin a communication with this person.”
READ: Transgenderism is a sin against at least four of the Ten Commandments: Franciscan priest
“That doesn’t mean I accept what they’re bringing forward. It just means I accept what they’re presenting to me as brother or sister.”
The Catholic Church teaches, in accordance with the natural law, that there are only two sexes and that everyone is created by God either male or female, as reflected by one’s immutable sex.
The Eighth Commandment, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “forbids misrepresenting the truth in our relations with others” – especially regarding Christian doctrine – which acceptance of someone’s false transgender “identity” would entail. “Every word or attitude is forbidden which by flattery, adulation, or complaisance encourages and confirms another in malicious acts and perverse conduct,” the Catechism teaches.
While declaring his willingness to affirm a person’s imagined “gender,” Coyne asserted that “the line obviously has to be clearly drawn by way of biology” with gender-confused individuals concerning matters like ordination.
The prelate was apparently referring to ordination to the priesthood and not to the diaconate, since he shared last year that he hopes “there will be some opportunity down the road [to] ordain or name some deaconesses.”
However, as former Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) prefect Cardinal Gerhard Müller has noted, “the impossibility that a woman validly receives the Sacrament of Holy Orders in each of the three degrees [deacon, priest, bishop] is a truth contained in Revelation and it is thus infallibly confirmed by the Church’s Magisterium and presented as to be believed.”
In 2002, the Vatican’s International Theological Commission wrote after much study that:
- The deaconesses mentioned in the tradition of the ancient Church — as evidenced by the rite of institution and the functions they exercised — were not purely and simply equivalent to the deacons;
- The unity of the sacrament of Holy Orders, in the clear distinction between the ministries of the bishop and the priests on the one hand and the diaconal ministry on the other, is strongly underlined by ecclesial tradition, especially in the teaching of the Magisterium
Theologian and liturgical scholar Dr. Peter Kwasniewski has explained in his book Ministers of Christ that not only “women priests” but “women deacons” are impossible because “all liturgical services within the sanctuary of the church represent Christ, the supreme ‘deacon.’”
Kwasniewski pointed out that minor orders, including the diaconate, cannot be compartmentalized from the priesthood, but “order the soul of the minor cleric gradually toward the eventual reception of the sacred priesthood itself, preparing him not merely at a natural level through the discharging of sacred duties but supernaturally through the spiritual conferral of priestly powers.”
Coyne has previously advocated for extending legal benefits to homosexual “couples” and has described transgender-identifying people’s gender confusion as “biological” and “who they are,” as LifeSiteNews reported. He has also said that being in a mortally sinful homosexual “marriage” does not necessarily make someone “a bad person or a bad Catholic.”
In 2022, while bishop of Burlington, Vermont, Coyne removed Father Peter Williams as pastor of Holy Family Parish in Springfield after the priest refused to accept Coyne’s COVID shot mandate, LifeSiteNews reported.