Gender ideology is more dangerous than Marxism and Communism, a bishop in the formerly Communist country of Poland has said.

Marek Jędraszewski, the new Archbishop of Krakow, said belief in the interchangeability of male and female, and trans ideology, was a fundamental denial of reality and “absurd” from a scientific point of view.

The archbishop, whose diocese was once held by Pope John Paul II, told Catholic News Agency that Pope Francis had emphasised to him in a meeting the danger of gender ideology because “it breaks with the anthropological vision of what the man [is] according [to] the work of the Creator God.”

“God created the man as male and female, while gender ideology does everything possible to cancel differences between man and woman,” the archbishop said.

“This is absurd from a biological point of view, and it does not deal just with the human being: gender ideology has dramatic consequences in social life and in current culture.”

“We cannot be open to this ideology, that is profoundly against God the Creator and against everything Christ himself taught us,” he said.

His comments come less than a month after another Catholic bishop, Cardinal Antonio Cañizares, slammed gender theory as a “denial of reason” that undermines the traditional family, which in turn leads to “social problems such as juvenile delinquency, drug abuse, prostitution and violence against women”.

In a statement released on the feast of the Epiphany, the cardinal said: “We must fight for human dignity and against every type of discrimination, but denying biological differences between men and women is not a solution.”

He had previously described gender ideology as the “most insidious and destructive ideology in all history”.

An LGBT group filed hate speech charges against him last year, accusing him of using words that were “full of hatred, homophobic and sexism, and incite hatred against those who do not fit into the archaic models defended by the Catholic hierarchy.”

The charges were dismissed just days later.