ON Monday the Congregation for Catholic Education published the grandly titled Male and Female He Created Them: Towards a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education.

It is addressed to Catholic schools and to those who, inspired by a Christian vision, work in other schools; to parents, students, and staff; but also to bishops, priests, and religious, as well as ecclesial movements and associations of the faithful.

Among the first to comprehensively rubbish the document was notorious Catholic “gay cure” charlatan Dr Gerard J M van den Aarweg, above – once described by LifeSiteNews as:

Europe’s foremost expert on homosexuality, pedophilia, and gays within the Catholic priesthood.

In an LSN interview, the 79-year-old Dutch psychologist said:

Basically, it is an ideological document. It is not specifically Catholic, in spite of some lip service. It essentially makes a plea for a kind of atheist-humanist/socialist sex education, presented as more or less Catholic. It gushes over the boons of a social model of sexual education monitored by ‘professional experts’ on the basis of naively supposed ever-deepening insights into sexuality in the current human sciences. It represents the kind of illusionary and sentimental talk about education and ‘affectivity’ characteristic of the immature and superficial humanistic psychology of the 1960s, but now proclaimed as ‘higher wisdom’ by a Vatican Congregation whose members run half a century behind the times.

The quack, who accused the authors of flirting with ‘neo-paganism’, concluded:

Finally, the style of the piece is terrible: it is permeated by pompous and sentimental language, hypocritical unctuousness. The intellectual level is substandard. No concept that is used is defined, no statement proved or even supported by some argumentation; the references and remarks relative to anthropology and psychology (‘the human sciences’) are misplaced or outright nonsensical, and yet they are solemnly presented as ‘superior wisdom.’ A Vatican congregation which dares to produce and issue such a document should seriously consider closing up shop.

This is rich, coming from a man whose own works have been universally slammed as maliciously nonsensical. Back in 2013, Wayne Besen of Truth Wins Out, wrote:

Unable to mask his hostile feelings, this therapist is incontrovertibly drenched in disgust and drips with disdain for the very clients he claims that he is trying to assist. The result is serially passing ignorance for insights, ridicule for research, and stereotypes for science. That this psychologist can be licensed, no less allowed to ‘treat’ patients, is a scandal that should deeply shame every respected mental health association. Similar to other NARTH [National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality*] therapists, van den Aardweg comes from a dark place of malice, which leads him to serially misdiagnose healthy gay clients as sick. This deliberate misdiagnosis, stemming from ideology rather than research, results in a series of bizarre ideas and poor advice that reasonable people will likely conclude leads to malpractice.

Published during LGBT Pride Month, the Vatican document was immediately denounced by LGBT Catholics. Francis DeBernardo, Executive Director of New Ways Ministry criticised the Vatican document as:

A harmful tool that will be used to oppress and harm not only transgender people, but lesbian, gay, bisexual people, too. The document associates sexual and gender minorities with libertine sexuality, a gross misrepresentation of the lives of LGBT people which perpetuates and encourages hatred, bigotry, and violence against them. The only truth that the document reveals is that the Vatican remains ill-equipped to discuss gender and sexuality in the modern world. People do not choose their gender, as the Vatican claims: they discover it through their lived experiences. The Church should respect and encourage this process of discovery, because it is a process by which individuals discover the wonderful way that God has created them.

* In 2014 NARTH, which had been facing many legal challenges and a deteriorating reputation, decided to rebrand itself. Now known as the NARTH Institute, the same organisation has become a division of the new Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity.

Besen’s reaction to the new organisation?