"the construct of 'gender' is the ultimate 'morning-after' pill because it hides all the tell-tale signs of our being 'whence and whither.'"

Pontifical John Paul II Institute, Washington, DC

     Margaret H. McCarthy, "The emperor’s (new) new clothes:  the logic of the new 'gender ideology,'" Communio:  international Catholic review 46, no. 3-4 (Fall-Winter 2019):  647 (620-659).

Christians today "are the lonely custodians of realities that are not technically speaking matters of faith, even as they are dismissed as [such]."

Pontifical John Paul Institute of Washington, DC

"We should not fail to notice the unique situation that Christians are in today:  they are the lonely custodians of realities that are not technically speaking matters of faith, even as they are dismissed as 'matters of faith.'  Chesterton described this unique situation over a century ago.

Everything will be denied.  Everything will become a creed.  It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them.  It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake.  Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four.  Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.  We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face.  We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible.  We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage.  We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed."

     Margaret H. McCarthy, quoting Heretics (1905), 305, in "The emperor’s (new) new clothes:  the logic of the new 'gender ideology,'" Communio:  international Catholic review 46, no. 3-4 (Fall-Winter 2019):  658 (620-659).

"a more basic distinction, prior to cultural variety"

Pontifical John Paul II Institute of Washington, DC

"I do not dispute that there is a distinction between [1] the fact of being sexually distinct (a boy or a girl, a man or a woman) and [2] 'living that difference out in a variety of cultures.'  But there is a more basic distinction, prior to cultural variety.  It is between [1] being one sex or the other (a boy or girl) and [2] growing up to become a man or a woman, which involves both [2a] the person 'living out' what he or she already is and [2b] those helping to raise him or her (parents, society, culture).  If we begin there, and not immediately with cultural variety, we allow ourselves to speak positively about the necessary role a culture has in forming a boy or a girl to maturity as a man or a woman. . . .  We extricate ourselves, in other words, from the agenda that originally inspired the search for cultural variety (beginning with Margaret Mead) to show how cultural 'expectations' are per se imposed externally in the arbitrary sense, according to the 'social construct' model belonging to the nature-nurture dualism.  Furthermore, in my view, the distinction as stated draws too sharp a distinction between [1] the biological and [2] the living out of sexual difference.  By using the modifier 'biological' for 'sex,' the terms are prey to the implication, however unintended, that 'living out' or 'expression' is not biological, and conversely, that 'sex,' or 'bodily, biological reality' is not always already socially embedded and in need of formation and personal 'living out.'  But that, of course, is not the case.  It is the one human organism (body and soul) that both is and then acts.  Think, for example[,] of the nursing of a child or the education of children and the making of a home, all of which are indivisibly human acts.  Think, too, of the fact that the human child is born 'too early,' and in need of the 'social uterus' of the family.  Perhaps the problem that the above distinctions are prey to arises from the preference for the use of 'biological' over 'natural,' the former being an abstraction of the latter.  As Karol Wojtyła said, 'The expression "order of nature" cannot be confused nor identified with the expression "biological order," as the latter, even though also signifying the order of nature, denotes it only inasmuch as it is accessible for the empirical-descriptive methods of natural sciences' (Love and Responsibility, trans. Grzegorz Ignatik [Boston:  Pauline Books and Media, 2013], 40).  In sum, by choosing the more abstract term, it is very difficult, especially in current circumstances given the history of the invention of the 'sex and gender' dyad, to designate the whole human organism who is male or female and then grows up to become a man or woman (quite apart from the actual intentions to the contrary of those using the modifier).  Finally, by using the 'sex and gender' pair . . . to indicate a proper distinction is to imagine, naively in my view, that anyone today is able to detect in the pair anything other than the dualisms the distinction has always existed to create and perpetuate."

     Margaret H. McCarthy, "The emperor’s (new) new clothes:  the logic of the new 'gender ideology,'" Communio:  international Catholic review 46, no. 3-4 (Fall-Winter 2019):  629n24, underscoring mine (620-659).  630n26:  "it would not be correct to refer to me as having a 'sound theory of gender,' as I do not recognize 'gender' as a thing distinct from sex."

A second perfection consisting in operation, not form

Commissio Leonina

"'There was matrimony in Paradise, and yet there was no carnal intercourse. Therefore carnal intercourse is not an integral part of matrimony' (In IV Sent. d. 26, q. 2, a. 4, sed c. 1; Summa theol., Supplementum, q. 42, a. 4, sed c. 1).  According to Aquinas, it is wrong [(ne faut pas)] to take from [Gen 1:27] and similar texts the liberty of affirming that sexuality—masculinity and femininity—enters into what constitutes man in the image of God.  Such an idea is contrary to the very notion of theology according to Aquinas, which consists in bringing to bear upon both creation and man the very regard of God, [and doing so] from God, namely from revelation and the gift of faith.  By contrast, the idea of seeing in masculinity and femininity an element of the image of God in man comes from [1] bringing an exclusively human regard to bear on the human being and from [2] the confusion between the essence of man and his activity.  Thomas grounds the imago Dei in the spiritual nature of man, [in] the intelligence and the will [that] constitute him as man.  For in God there is an intelligence and a will, but not a body:  'God is spirit'. . . .  Moreover, the-image-of-God-that-man-is is an image to be perfected by virtuous and meritorious activity.  It is by his activity that man 'becomes' the image of God, and this means that [(et en cela)] the exercise of sexuality, as well as [that] of perfect continence, realizes this image.  Were masculinity and femininity to constitute for man an element of his being in the image of God, [then,] on the one hand, God would have to have a body, for the divine ideas of masculinity and femininity are not principle[s] of 'being in the image of,' for they are ideas, as Augustine put it so very well:  'it is there where there is no sex that man was made to the image of God, that is in the spirit of his mind' (De Trinitate XII.3.12).  [And,] on the other hand, all would have to exercise [their] sexuality in order to perfect this image, with the absurd consequence that those who live in perfect continence would never realize it."

     Adriano Oliva, O.P., "Essence et finalité du marriage selon Thomas d'Aquin pour un soin pastoral renouvelé," Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 98, no. 4 (2014):  604n11 (601-668), translation mine.