When British socialists founded the Fabian Society in 1884, they picked a most appropriate symbol to represent their goal of using gradual means, rather than revolutionary confrontation, to transform their country into a socialist paradise.
That symbol? A wolf wearing a sheepskin.
Such a symbol also would make an appropriate coat of arms for a pope who uses stealth and subterfuge to transform the Catholic Church into the world’s largest LGBTQ+ grooming agency.
As FrontPage Magazine has often reported, Pope Francis is slowly leading the church into a full embrace of gender ideology under the guise of “mercy” and “accompaniment.” Though Francis has criticized gender theory as “ideological colonization,” his appointments expose his duplicity. But two recent events blatantly unmasked Francis’ ultimate goal.
When the Vatican celebrated World Children’s Day — a holiday it created — on May 25, a male drag performer danced in front of children. The performer even exposed his covered buttocks deliberately to them.
That performer, Carmine De Rosa, said on social media that the Vatican officially invited him to perform and knew what his act constituted: “I would like to point out, reading the comments, that I was WANTED at this event FOR THE TYPE OF SHOW I CARRY ON STAGE and for professionalism…But I simply defend MY ART. (Capitals in original)”
One week later, Francis appointed three prelates who support gender ideology to the Dicastery for the Development of Doctrine, the Vatican’s highest theological body. Monsignor Bruno Forte advocates greater acceptance for homosexuality and LGBTQ+ relationships in the church, as well as protection of their legal rights. Forte expressed those ideas in the report for the Vatican’s Synod on the Family in 2014.
Cardinal Marcello Semenaro — who supports civil same-sex unions, as does Francis — annually holds in his diocese the Forum for Italian LGBT Christians, designed “precisely to make homosexuality — and not just persons with homosexual tendencies — fully accepted inside the Church,” reported Riccardo Cascioli. “It aspires to change the Catholic Catechism and argues for a rereading of Sacred Scripture according to a rainbow ideology.”
Another cardinal, Portugal’s Jose Tolentino de Mendonca, wrote the preface to a book by Sister Maria Teresa Forcades i Vila advocating “queer theology.” In 2015, she expressed her support for same-sex marriage “because sexual identities are not to be considered as closed boxes that God wants to complement each other and that must remain forever like this, fixed in defined and separate roles,” she told the Milan daily Corriere della Sera.
The next year, she told Italy’s La Repubblica that same-sex love was sacramental, and same-sex couples should be able to adopt children.
“A sacrament is the manifestation of God’s love in space and time,” she said. “Love is always a sacrament of God if it respects the freedom of the other. Possessive love, on the other hand, even if it is between a man and a woman, may not be sacramental in the profound meaning of the term.”
Forcades i Vila added that she “absolutely” supports same-sex adoptions: “What children need is adult, mature and responsible love from parents who put their needs before their own and who at the same time know how to set the right limits for them and help them grow. Growing up with two women or two men is not a problem.” (Emphasis added)
One frightening thought:Tolentino de Mendonca devised the idea for World Children’s Day.
Francis prepared the way for all three men last year by appointing Argentine Cardinal Victor Fernandez to be the dicastery’s chief of doctrine. Fernandez’s theological writings include two blatantly erotic works.
One book, which Fernandez called “a pastor’s catechesis for teens,” is Heal Me with Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing. In another book, Mystical Passion: Spirituality and Sensuality, Fernandez wrote that believers could experience “a kind of fulfilling orgasm in our relationship with God,” that homosexuals “will (not) necessarily stop being homosexual” after experiencing divine grace and that those influenced by “strong conditioning…can do things that are objectively sinful, without being guilty, and without losing the grace of God or the experience of his love.”
In an interview days after his appointment, Fernandez personally exemplified Francis’ duplicity. The Vatican’s new head of doctrine defended traditional marriage yet allowed the possibility of blessing same-sex unions.
“At the same time, I think we should avoid gestures or actions that may express something different,” he said. “That is why I think the greatest care must be taken to avoid rites or blessings that can feed this confusion. Now, if a blessing is given in such a way that it does not cause that confusion, it will have to be analyzed and confirmed.” (Emphasis added)
Fernandez expressed that position in December with Fiducia Supplicans, which allows priests to bless unmarried same sex-couples spontaneously and which Francis approved.
Before making those appointments to the Vatican’s most important theological body, Francis seeded the ground at lower levels. An American Jesuit, the Rev. James Martin, the editor-at-large of the Jesuit magazine America, serves as a papal communications advisor. Martin founded Outreach, a Catholic LGBTQ ministry, and uses his various platforms, especially Twitter/X, to promote gender ideology, subtly endorse transgender medical procedures for children and openly oppose biblical teaching on homosexuality — as FrontPage Magazine reported.
Martin even connected his book discussing the meaning of Lazarus’ resurrection in John 11 to gender ideology:
“This message, however, is especially important for LGBTQ people,” he wrote. ” ‘Coming out’ means to accept, embrace and love who you are, especially your sexuality and the way that God made you, and to reveal or share that part of yourself with others. Coming out is often a critical step for LGBTQ people, who are sometimes told, either overtly or covertly, that they should not accept or love themselves.Or, worst of all, that God doesn’t love them.” (Italics added)
On June 12, Martin tweeted that Francis “confirmed my ministry with LGBTQ people and showed his openness and love for the LGBTQ community,” adding that “the Holy Father said he has known many good, holy and celibate seminarians and priests with homosexual tendencies.”
This despite the fact that twice in the previous three weeks, Francis reaffirmed the church’s ban on homosexual seminarians, even using a vulgar slur to describe their sexual behavior.
Others hold higher positions. San Diego Cardinal Robert McElroy demands the “radical inclusion” of LGBTQ+ Catholics without having them repent from their sexual behavior. Luxembourg Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, one of Francis’ closest advisors, publicly rejects historic teaching on homosexuality and believes doctrinal change is inevitable.
“I believe that this is wrong,” Hollerich said about historic teaching that condemns homosexuality. “But I also believe that we are thinking ahead here in teaching. The way the Pope has expressed himself in the past can lead to a change in doctrine.” (emphasis added)
Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life — which Pope John Paul II founded to fight abortion — commissioned a homoerotic painting for his cathedral. Paglia also developed a sex-education course for teens that one Catholic psychologist called “the most dangerous threat to Catholic youth that I have seen over the past 40 years” because of “pornographic images … used by adult sexual predators of adolescents.”
Paglia’s diocese and former parish are not the only church jurisdictions facing Fabian transformation.
In the Diocese of Lexington, Ky., St. Paul’s Catholic Church offers same-sex blessings by appointment, contrary to Fiducia Supplicans. The website for the parish’s LGBTQ ministry also has a prayer to “Our Mother of Pride,” featuring Mary cloaked in a rainbow flag and holding an infant Jesus.
In May, Lexington Bishop John Stowe issued a statement supporting a woman who lives as a monastic hermit and identifies as a man; Stowe even used male pronouns for the hermit. In 2021, Stowe publicly supported expanding the 1964 Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination by sexual orientation or gender identity, despite opposition from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which expressed concern about religious discrimination. The House of Representatives passed the proposal in 2021 but it died in a Senate committee.
Two years earlier, Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., told a transgender Catholic, “you belong to the heart of this church,” he said. “If you’re asking me where do you fit, you fit in the family.”
Helping emotionally wounded people heal from immense pain is one thing. Ignoring or denying the consequences of their behavior is quite another. Valuing such a group over the innocent reaches a different level entirely.
But as the spectacle of a drag performer dancing in front of children at a Vatican event clearly demonstrates, Francis and his cohorts have no interest in protecting the innocent. By appeasing gender ideologues, by deliberately confusing mercy with enabling, Francis and his sycophants fully intend to “queer” the Catholic Church.
Children be damned.