Frankly Francis

In his new letter on marriage and the family, Amoris Laetitia, Francis teaches that teaching kids about safe sex “promotes narcissism,” that transgender teens should just stop complaining and “accept their own body as it was created,” and that same-sex couples are not “legitimate families.”

Claiming that transgender teens are “self-centered” and “self-absorbed,” Francis said:

The young need to be helped to accept their own body as it was created, for thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation.

An appreciation of our body as male or female is also necessary for our own self-awareness in an encounter with others different from ourselves. In this way we can joyfully accept the specific gifts of another man or woman, the work of God the Creator, and find mutual enrichment.

In addition, Francis says that gay people should receive “assistance” to bring them back to “normality,” affirming that there are “absolutely no grounds” for considering recognition of “homosexual unions:

In discussing the dignity and mission of the family, the Synod Fathers observed that, as for proposals to place unions between homosexual persons on the same level as marriage, there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.

As well as condemning abortion, the document contains many references to Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae and John Paul II’s writings on contraception (68, 81 82, 151, 155, 283) Perhaps the strongest restatement of Church teaching is this (80):

Nonetheless, the conjugal union is ordered to procreation ‘by its very nature’. The child who is born ‘does not come from outside as something added on to the mutual love of the spouses, but springs from the very heart of that mutual giving, as its fruit and fulfilment.

Continuing:

He or she does not appear at the end of a process, but is present from the beginning of love as an essential feature, one that cannot be denied without disfiguring that love itself. From the outset, love refuses every impulse to close in on itself; it is open to a fruitfulness that draws it beyond itself. Hence no genital act of husband and wife can refuse this meaning, even when for various reasons it may not always in fact beget a new life.

The transgended phenomenon is worth of investigation. Of Pope Francis no doubt the LGBTQIA community will retort, "Who is he to judge?"