Catholic Cruelty: Pope Francis argues transgender teens must stop complaining, deny their lived experience, and “accept their own body as it was created.”

In his new letter on marriage and the family, Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”), Francis claims 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 writes:

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.

On sex education, Francis opines:

Frequently, sex education deals primarily with ‘protection’ through the practice of ‘safe sex’ Such expressions convey a negative attitude towards the natural procreative finality of sexuality, as if an eventual child were an enemy to be protected against. This way of thinking promotes narcissism and aggressively in place of acceptance. It is always irresponsible to invite adolescents to toy with their bodies and their desires, as if they possessed the maturity, values, mutual commitment and goals proper to marriage.

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

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.

Bottom line: Francis is a religious bigot, promoting obnoxious, unreasonable, and morally indefensible positions. However, he has a nice smile, and much better public relations than the conservative Christians currently ruling the Republican party; and so some progressives, and the mainstream media, continue to give this moral monster a pass.

(H/T Pink News, Danthropology)