VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Pope Francis has told the heterodox and Vatican-censured Sister Jeannine Gramick that “transgender people must be accepted and integrated into society.”
The Pope’s comments came as a response to a letter sent by Gramick, in which the pro-LGBT nun expressed her “sadness and my disappointment with the use of the concept, ‘gender ideology’” in the recently published document Dignitas infinita.
READ: ‘It almost killed me’: Ex-trans teen slams ‘gender transitioning’ in powerful speech
Published on April 8, the Vatican’s Dignitas infinita (DI) is critical of “gender theory,” more commonly known as “gender ideology.” Quoting from Amoris Laetitia, DI’s author Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández wrote that gender ideology “envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family.”
The ideology “intends to deny the greatest possible difference that exists between living beings: sexual difference,” said Fernández, adding that “all attempts to obscure reference to the ineliminable sexual difference between man and woman are to be rejected.” The document, however, makes no mention of homosexuality.
Sister Gramick ‘very sad’ about gender ideology criticism
Revealing details of the Pope’s communication with her, Gramick outlined that she had first written to the Pontiff after DI was published. Stating how she was “very sad” since its publication, Gramick alleged that the document’s “section on Gender Theory, which condemns ‘gender ideology,’ is harming” gender-confused persons.
She revealed that she wrote to Francis “to tell him about my sadness and my disappointment with the use of the concept, ‘gender ideology.’ He responded by sharing his understanding of this idea—an understanding that I had not heard before.”
He also allegedly referred to persons suffering from gender dysphoria or homosexual tendencies as “homosexual or transsexual people,” falsely defining them by their disordered conditions.
READ: Young people expose damage caused by LGBT movement on ‘Detrans Awareness Day’
The Pope’s comments, as presented by Gramick, the co-founder of heretical, pro-LGBT New Ways Ministry (NWM), were as follows:
Gender ideology is something other than homosexual or transsexual people [sic]. Gender ideology makes everyone equal without respect for personal history. I understand the concern about that paragraph in Dignitas Infinita, but it refers not to transgender people [sic] but to gender ideology, which nullifies differences. Transgender people [sic] must be accepted and integrated into society.
According to Gramick, Francis explained “gender ideology” as being something which “envisages a society without sexual differences,” which DI states in paragraph 59.
Gramick defends blasphemous, pro-transgender arguments
Gramick, however, stated that the Pope’s explanation was not satisfactory, as she continued:
I wrote to our beloved pope again, telling him that, unfortunately in the U.S. (and elsewhere in the world), ‘gender ideology’ has a different meaning. It does not mean nullifying or not respecting differences. Quite the opposite is true: those who use that term do not consider or respect a person’s history and experience of gender. I believe that people who use the term ‘gender ideology’ have most likely never accompanied transgender persons [sic].
READ: Detransitioner sues medical group for pressuring her into removing breasts at age 13
Recounting how her position had changed on accepting arguments in favor of “sex change” surgery, Gramick posited: “How must it feel to live in a body with an identity contrary to how you believe God created you in your soul?”
The human person is created by God as a soul-body unity, as the Catholic Church has always taught, and an individual soul is permanently marked by one’s sex.
Continuing, Gramick defended the blasphemous, pro-transgender argument that God creates people with a fundamental difference in their physical identity and that of their soul, claiming a gender-confused person “realizes that their body does not match their soul,” despite this being impossible. She stated:
Transgender persons do not erase or deny sexual or gender differences. It is precisely because a transgender person knows that there are gender differences that the person realizes that their body does not match their soul.
Gramick – who has a long history of dissenting from Catholic teaching on homosexuality and abortion and was officially censured by Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 1999 but has ignored the order – argued that the Church should assist in affirming transgender-identifying individuals in their mistaken identities, blasphemously suggesting that God “intends” such people to embrace their disordered tendencies and falsely present themselves as the opposite sex.
“The Church should aid in removing the pain so the person can become one in mind and body as God intends,” she said, accusing the Church of putting a “serious burden” on people who have confusion about their sex by affirming the reality of their sexed nature.
Despite her long history of heterodoxy and advocacy for positions contravening Catholic teaching, Gramick has found signal favor from Pope Francis in recent years, receiving a number of letters from him in support of her pro-LGBT group and personal activism.
During the 2023 Synod on Synodality meeting, she was received by the Pope in a private audience granted to her and her colleagues from NWM, the group she co-founded in 1977 with dissident priest Robert Nugent. The papal audience was described as highlighting a “new openness” to Gramick’s work.
Yet Gramick’s official 1999 censure from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was strict and has not been officially revoked. The declaration read:
The ambiguities and errors of the approach of Father Nugent and Sister Gramick have caused confusion among the Catholic people and have harmed the community of the Church. For these reasons, Sister Jeannine Gramick, SSND, and Father Robert Nugent, SDS, are permanently prohibited from any pastoral work involving homosexual persons and are ineligible, for an undetermined period, for any office in their respective religious institutes.
READ: Pro-LGBT nun with papal support argues Church teaching on homosexuality will ‘inevitably change’
“I think in the long run… Pope Francis is laying the groundwork for change in sexuality,” Gramick said last fall, in response to a question about the possibility for “substantial change in church teaching on homosexuality.”
RELATED
Amoris Laetitia is a ticking ‘atomic bomb’ set to obliterate all Catholic morality: philosopher