A senior Catholic cardinal said during the 12th Annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC on Tuesday that transgender people are “demonic” and are causing the “death of God.”

Cardinal Robert Sarah, who holds the title of Prefect of the Cong Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, addressed lawmakers at the annual DC National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, according Pink News.

“The death of God results in the burial of good, beauty, love and truth. Good becomes evil, beauty is ugly, love becomes the satisfaction of sexual primal instincts, and truths are all relative,” Sarah said.

“So all manner of immorality is not only accepted and tolerated today in advanced societies, but even promoted as a social good. The result is hostility to Christians, and, increasingly, religious persecution. Nowhere is this clearer than in the threat that societies are visiting on the family through a demonic gender ideology, a deadly impulse that is being experienced in a world increasingly cut off from God through ideological colonialism.”

The influential cardinal also railed against same-sex marriages, artificial reproductive technologies, surrogacy and same-sex adoptions.

“The rupture of the foundational relationships of someone’s life – through separation, divorce or distorted impositions of the family, such as cohabitation and same sex unions – is a deep wound that closes the heart to self-giving love unto death, and even leads to cynicism and despair,” Sarah said. “These situations cause damage to little children through inflicting upon them a deep existential doubt about love.

“Sadly, the advent of artificial reproductive technologies, surrogacy, so-called homosexual ‘marriage’, and other evils of gender ideology, will inflict even more wounds in the midst of the generations we live with.

“This is not about abstract ideas. It is not an ideological war between competing ideas. This is about defending ourselves, children and future generations from a demonic ideology that says children do not need mothers and fathers.

“It denies human nature and wants to cut off entire generations from God.”