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The Roman Catholic Church sometimes seems difficult to map into modern politics. Pope Leo XIV has urged compassion for migrants. Both Francis, his predecessor, and Leo have challenged the U.S. government’s brutality. The church is also still regularly embroiled in scandals as new revelations of sexual abuse come out. Leo is no exception, with controversies following his own leniency towards such abusers.

The church sets up charity hospitals, food kitchens, and schools, particularly in impoverished areas of the world, and in those same places it has established deep ties with reactionary politicians. Controversy around Francis’s own involvement with the Dirty War in Argentina hung over his papacy’s early days. They will preach peace, love, dignity for all, while (as previously covered in Trans News Network) crushing the rights of LGBTQ people with ruthless, extra-governmental authority.

The church’s draconian trans health care ban in the U.S. remains the most sweeping in the country, a key part of an escalating trans genocide.

With one hand, the Catholic Church seems to be opposing the far-right and its flagbearers, and with the other hand it actively promotes policies which further reactionary interests. Is this simply a case of overzealous application of Matthew 6:3, or does the right hand of the church know what the left is doing?

The Catholic Church, founded either in 33 CE, 313 CE, or 1054 CE (depending on your opinion of schism, legitimacy of certain councils, and personal sectarianism), is one of the most powerful reactionary organizations in history. To describe it as such often causes great consternation, particularly in recent years when the papacy has repeatedly received praise for its seemingly progressive shift.

But religion is not, and cannot be, a shield for stating the obvious: an examination of the doctrine, actions, and structure of the Catholic Church puts to rest any notion that there is some progressive force animating it. While I am an admirer of people like Dorothy Day and Ernesto Cardenal, remembering that they were and are opposed by much of the church’s hierarchy is important in any conversation. An institution can have individually admirable people, while still being a deeply reactionary, violent entity.

Leo belongs to an order of monks known as the Augustinians, or the Order of Saint Augustine. One of the oldest orders of the Catholic Church, the Augustinians are rooted in the teachings of St. Augustine of Hippo, and date back to the 13th century. In turn, the Rule of Saint Augustine which they follow was written around the 5th century.

To this day, Augustine of Hippo is considered one of the greatest theologians in history, and is frequently quoted by Leo as relevant, timely, and important. Much was made of the pope recently citing Tolkien in his encyclical, but Augustine is referenced more often and is far more fundamental to Leo’s theology. The church will reach back multiple centuries to quote theologians as a matter of course. No one in the Catholic Church conceives of themselves as a radical overturning the world order, but instead as a member of a long, legitimately millennia-old, movement to keep alive the will and word of God.

Through holy wars, plagues, nationalist uprisings, the rise and fall of fascist and communist regimes, the church has survived and maintained its power in differing forms. In short, the institution looks at the modern world, all of its problems, and reaches back centuries for its solutions and remains resolutely confident that no matter what happens or how many are justifiably enraged at it, it will outlast the crisis.

One of the specialties of Augustinian thought is its view on sin. Augustine posited that the original sin of mankind, exemplified in the Fall from the Garden of Eden, is our desire and willingness to be tempted. Physical sensations tempt us, and we reject God and the holy in favour of these sensations. In the Garden, this was the apple: Eve’s weakness of spirit —an inherent weakness of women, according to Augustine —severed her from Adam, and Adam, not being able to bear the thought of losing his one companion, followed woman into sin, lust, and pride.

Not shockingly, from that incredibly misogynistic mess, Augustine was incredibly sex-negative, perceiving sex as inherently sinful and its products (namely, children) as tainted and requiring salvation through the church.

While it should be noted that Augustinian thought is not the sole explanation for original sin, the fact such reactionary views are still, broadly, accepted by the church and that the pope belongs to an order dedicated to honoring this man and his beliefs, are both relevant to any discussion of the church and its views on the modern world.

Following Augustine, and countless other figures, is that core to the Catholic Church is a virulent strain of misogyny which has, for the most part, been disregarded in modern discourse. Sometimes, it’s even framed as something which is modernizing or making slow progress.

Instead, the Catholic Church has thoroughly ossified its ideology around gender into an instrument of control. Within the doctrine of the Catholic Church, the barring of women from ordination serves to cut women out of the most important roles in the hierarchy while still appearing to be granting them more of a direct say in things.

While there are prominent women, including nuns, active in the institution, women are completely barred ordination and thus being the leading role in sacraments of confession, the eucharist, and marriage.

These sacraments, considered the literal and genuine acts of God and the central feature of the church’s life, means that women are placed in a perpetually subservient role to men. The refusal to ordain women is seen as, if considered at all, a quaint feature of an old-man club which will eventually modernize, instead of the natural end-result of an intensely misogynistic theology.

No matter what positions a woman may be given, and some do hold high positions, they will never cast a vote for the pope, act as a clergywoman, or do anything else that might constitute full participation in the political realities of the church. They are simply barred from it.

The Eucharist, the central sacrament of the Catholic Church, performed at Notre Dame cathedral. Wikimedia Commons

When women are given places at the table, it is out of an attempt to make overtures to the demands of feminist activists or a desire to get a quick story out about a largely-meaningless “reform.” Women exist as advisors to men but structurally, theologically, the Catholic Church believes that the difference between the sexes is “the greatest possible difference that exists between living…the greatest and most powerful of them [differences]” and affirms that “everyone, man and woman, should acknowledge and accept his sexual identity.” It couples this with the difference being wholly “oriented toward the goods of marriage and the flourishing of family life,” or in less polite terms, that God makes women so they can have children or be chaste.

This theology, known as complimentarianism, is strewn throughout all of Catholic life. Nuns taught me when I was young, while the priests engaged in the work of making a church run. Those sisters showed constant deference to the priests as the true authority. Women talked about their husbands with a mix of genuine love and resignation, a large family was a gift. There was always a hint of sadness when I, in my childish innocence, asked them what they did for work and they told me of past careers, long dead dreams sacrificed for a family which grew from one to two, two to four, four to eight children.

Many Catholic schools are gender-segregated, and as a young trans woman I was pressed into the all-male school and told repeatedly what my role was: I was to become a provider for a family, preferably large, with a wife (preferably from the complimentary all-female school). This was associated, inevitably, with violence-tinged celebration of physical strength and an extremely strong culture of in-group/out-group dynamics.

To call the harassment of gender nonconformity in such an environment profoundly horrific is to undersell it.

In confidence, I came out to a friend. A week later, I was isolated. Teachers retracted their support as firmly as peers, and a mix of misunderstanding and malice dominated the final few months of my education there. Anyone tangentially related to the church has been consistent in wholesale rejection of my transgender identity and it was in the context of the Catholic Church that I first ever heard the term “gender ideology,” so often invoked by those who seek to eradicate trans existence.

Strictly speaking, complimentarianism is itself a gender ideology. It is an ideology about gender. But of course, that is not what is meant by the term within the Catholic Church.

Instead, what is meant is the concerted effort to introduce the idea that, God forbid, transgender and nonbinary identities are legitimate expressions of human life. Many arguments against the concept of transgender and nonbinary identity can be found within the doctrinal statements of the Catholic Church, even the supposedly progressive ones.

Calling it an “ideological colonization” and a “danger,” the Catholic Church positions transgender and nonbinary identity as threatening to the entire concept of God’s will. What is meant by “gender ideology” is not, in fact, some coherent idea. After all, transgender people can hardly agree among ourselves what it means to be transgender in the first place! Instead, it is a term used to describe any belief in the legitimacy of transgender identity regardless of nuances.

The Catholic Church has girded itself against arguments typical to many strains of pro-trans activism. Within the concept of the Church, there is no such thing as a “wrong body,” but not in any affirming way. God created the mind, body, and soul as a single unit, and one’s own emotional state is not in fact evidence of any difference between your body or mind or soul. Many people outside the Church may believe that there is a dualism, that the concept of the soul “leaving the body” implies that they are distinct.

This is not true: in Catholic theology the body and soul are intimately connected, and one’s body being born male or female means that the soul is, too, male or female. If the soul is unchanging and immutable, it follows that the body is also, in some fundamental and possibly neoplatonic manner, also unchanging. Maleness and femaleness are as intrinsic to human existence as carbon or nitrogen, so says the church.

In fact, in a particularly excellent example of the way many people fundamentally misunderstand the Catholic Church’s position of transgender people? The church, like many supposed allies, will affirm that sex and gender are in fact different. Many times in my life I have heard the argument that sex and gender are different, and that transgender people change their gender, but not their sex. There are many nuances one can make, but more often than not the implicit argument is that transgender women are fundamentally and forever men, or transgender men are fundamentally and forever women.

“Sex is not gender,” as a refrain, is sometimes used as a way to try to carve out a legitimate place for transgender people while still affirming that we are not who we say we are. No matter who says it, it implies an inherent falseness to trans identity. And in the case of the Catholic Church?

“‘Biological sex and the socio-cultural role of sex (gender) can be distinguished but not separated.’” So says Dignitas Infinita, the 2024 statement of doctrine by Pope Francis. In 2025 American bishops invoked it in overwhelmingly passing a total ban on all trans healthcare.

In fact, Dignitas is the deepest treatment the issue of transgender people have ever been given by the church. Placed alongside such horrors as sexual violence, slavery, and poverty, “gender ideology” and sex changes are both listed in the document as violations of the intrinsic dignity of man, and as threats to God’s divine plan for Earth.

Please remember that: the Church discusses transgender people and our medical care as violations of human dignity after euthanasia, marginalization of the disabled, and abortion. Dignitas goes on to further state that the “male-female couple, this difference…thus becomes the source of that miracle…the arrival of new human beings in the world.”

There’s no small amount of homophobia and misogyny nestled into this position as well by inherently positioning cishet relationships as superior–divine–compared to others, along with positing the woman’s role in a relationship is to have children.

“Only by acknowledging and accepting this difference in reciprocity can each person fully discover themselves, their dignity, and their identity.” This word, “dignity,” is calculated to sound universal. But it is divided into categories, an inherent dignity that all humanity possesses by virtue of their creation by God, a social dignity (one’s living conditions being sufficient to thrive), existential dignity (one’s own perception of their dignity and quality of life) and most important for our discussion: moral dignity.

Moral dignity is defined as the ability to use one’s free will to act, which is violated when they act "in a way that is ‘not dignified’ with respect to their nature as creatures who are loved by God and called to love others.” While this, again, sounds universal and like it may apply only to those who are truly evil, we must take it in context.

When one considers that the church also teaches that there are exactly two gender identities permitted by God, that those gender identities have specific, narrow roles, when those gender identities are unchanging and immutable, that gender confirmation surgery is a violation of the dignity of humanity alongside abortion, murder, and sexual violence, that “sexual difference” is a gift from God and attempts to alter or downplay it is itself a threat to damage, and that all human beings have a moral dignity that they can destroy while maintaining the valuable ontological dignity gifted from God?

Beyond all the rhetoric, all the philosophy, all the theology, all the caveating, the position is simple: God loves everyone, even the faggots. He just cannot tolerate what you’re doing, and that gives the church the authority to oppress you however they wish.

There is no actual difference between this position and a Protestant Evangelical mewling that he “loves the sinners, hates the sins.” There is no wiggle-room, no exception. In fact, the church spills far more ink on finding all of the different loopholes or potential methods one could interpret their theology in an affirming light than they ever do saying that transgender people are deserving of respect. We’re not, after all. We’re deserving of pity, prayer, and the fervent belief we will correct our errors of existence.

This lack of flexibility is intentional, as the Catholic Church seeks to tightly control doctrine and respond to the modern world in the way that suits it best. Rogue priests who are affirming, who defy these expectations, can expect stern reproaches and potentially even excommunication. These statements of doctrine are not negotiable, nor are they up for interpretation.

While it is not strictly impossible that these things may change in the future, the consistent stance of the Catholic Church has been that transgender individuals are living in sin, are morally undignified, are set apart from the rest of the world by their choices and deserve a denial of their healthcare and basic rights until they’re forced to detransition.

Priests are fully permitted to deny a trans person the right to be a godparent, citing the idea that ‘scandal’ may result from such an action. This is often framed as a permission given, it is in fact a restriction declared. It is entirely up to the whims of the officiating priest if he accepts a transgender godparent, not the parents of the child.

While this may seem minor, in the church to be a godparent is to take on the moral education of a young person, assisting their parents in the raising of a human being. It is an important sign of trust and acceptance, an affirmation that you are seen as a good person, a person worthy of emulating, and that you matter in your community. To be denied that is, in short, to be told that you are not considered a moral actor, regardless of how you may live. Baptism itself falls under the same rules, fully allowing a priest to reject a potential convert solely for the reason of being transgender.

As far back as 2000, the church hierarchy decided that one could not enter legal marriage vows if they had undergone gender confirmation surgery, as their “mental state” invalidated their ability to engage in binding, consensual vows.

As recently as 2025, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (which, it should be noted, is the new name of the Roman Inquisition!) stated that even while extreme dysphoria must be approached with care and that “cruelty” should be avoided, sex change itself is still condemned. How, then, should it be handled? They do not say, because to say what they think would be to cause a backlash as people realize that their seeming evolution, growing tolerance, is nothing but a smoke-and-mirrors show.

Even in that same document that states they must ‘avoid cruelty’ calls the claim to a ‘new identity’ through a ‘change of sex’ is the result of a ‘technocratic paradigm’ that is attempting to create an ‘alternative reality.’

There is hardly even room for love within the doctrine of the Church. Initially reported quite positively by secular outlets, Solange Ayala married her husband Isaías in Corrientes, Argentina. Both of them were and are active members of the community where they live, and expressed a desire to marry within the church; something they saw as ‘impossible’ before it happened. The marriage happened fully within Catholic theology: they themselves will say, after all, that they are a man and woman marrying under any definition. The archbishop himself is reported to have signed off on it.

This happy state of affairs, one which would have represented a genuine (if limited) move forwards from the Catholic Church, lasted less than three weeks, as their marriage (which occurred on Jan. 28) was annulled by Feb. 8, with declarations that it was “null ipso facto” and that conditions were not met for a licit and valid marriage. While there has not been news of what happened after February that I could find, the possibility of steeper canonical sanctions have been raised.

This is in line with everything already described. The church, realizing that it could have actually changed, could have actually allowed for even some transgender people to have their own dignity, existence, and life affirmed, fled fast from the idea as soon as they realized what had happened. To describe this fiasco as upholding some sort of dignity, love, care, pastoral obligation, as anything but naked and bitter transphobia is to give the church the type of grace they have never and will never extend to queer people.

I am a Catholic. Not particularly good at being one, what with being a transgender lesbian, but if weeping in the Basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua and holding a rosary for comfort on flights and on occasion praying one of the coterie of saints (who I have always felt closer to than too-perfect Jesus, admittedly) is any indication, my background as a Catholic is not some distant past I reject. There is pain, frustration, and sadness in knowing that the closest thing I have to a spiritual life is in the grips of an institution that wants me and everyone I love to hate ourselves.

The Tomb of St. Anthony of Padua, taken by the author

It would be bad enough if it stayed there, a deeply bigoted institution causing harm to its own members. But this doctrine and theology is put into practice, sweeping up Catholics and non-Catholics alike under its authority. There is no need for an army, police force, or direct control over the political system to enforce Catholic dogma upon people.

After all: what do you do when the hospitals, schools, food banks, and more near you are all Catholic?

While we do not live in a Catholic theocracy and the invalidation of a marriage is mostly a technical detail of one’s own personal morality, the effects the church’s actions have upon the world can be significant. We live in a world where people, sometimes of deep faith, sometimes of staunch atheism, are both harmed by the actions of an institution which claims total moral authority and the loyalty of over one billion souls. This power is significant, and results in them having control over everything from hospitals to charity work, homeless shelters to elder care homes.

Regardless of one’s personal beliefs, interaction with the Church and its organizations is practically inevitable in many regions of the world, and vast networks of control crisscross borders both national and international.

When nearly a full half of hospital beds are run by the Catholic Church in your region, that is an effective ban on transgender healthcare.

Schools run by the Catholic Church are currently arguing they have the right to exclude children from LGBT+ parents while retaining their taxpayer-funded status, and sex education among Catholic Schools is lacking to say the least (the Catholic Education Resource Centre claims that sex education is a total failure pushed by ideologues).

What is undeniable, then, is the existence of an organization which is dedicated to using its soft power to influence the world and hide behind the religious protections of modern society to force us, piece by piece, back into a theocratic, misogynistic, anti-queer, system wherein the Church patronizes the State by taking on capacity the government would rather not spend money on.

A map from a 2020 Community Catalyst report showing the vast scale of Catholic Church-run healthcare networks. Trans healthcare is completely banned in all of them

Being educated in Canada, my high-school did not completely dispense with sex education. But the teacher was certain to remind us repeatedly, alongside graphic photos of the consequences of pre-martial sex (mostly in the form of late-stage STIs), that God disapproved of fornication.

One moment which has stuck with me was the teacher’s urging that we not see condoms as a solution: that the moral harm of ‘safe’ sex was just as worth consideration as the physical risks of unsafe sex. While a bunch of hormonal teenage boys (and me, badly pretending to be a boy) received this message, we were hardly the only ones.

Quite infamously, the Catholic Church’s opposition to condoms has had major consequences in the fight against AIDs. This opposition has caused harm which quite literally cannot be calculated due to the inherent messiness of ‘did someone decide to not provide/use condoms because of their Catholic faith’ as a question. But the number of dead is, certainly, not zero. The influence the Catholic Church has on healthcare is multilayered and its doctrine is often imposed upon and against reality.

One incredible example of this comes in the form of the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control. When oral contraception came on to the market, there was a significant debate across basically every Christian sect about how to respond. The pope at the time, John XXIII, put together a commission to investigate the Catholic church’s response.

Famously, the majority report (which was not a slim majority either!) found that there was a case to be made for contraception’s acceptability. The minority report, however, was what eventually formed the doctrine of birth control as it stands today in the Catholic Church.

The minority report is a case study in what we might refer to as “mask-off” Catholicism, in that it was never intended for public release. It was, instead, leaked to the press. As such, it is a revealing document whose core arguments are about the threat to the church’s control over its own narrative of total moral authority:

“If contraception were declared not intrinsically evil, it would have to be acknowledged that the Holy Spirit…assisted Protestant Churches [note: Protestant churches had permitted, and the Catholic church condemned, contraception well before this commission]…one must inquire whether the change which is proposed would not bring along with it a definitive depreciation of the teaching and the moral direction…of the Church.”

The minority report argued at least in part that contraception was unacceptable since the Catholic church changing doctrine at this point might undermine claims to absolute moral authority. The pope accepted that argument, and the Catholic Church’s ban on contraception has since been total in all cases.

Each Catholic hospital, school, and shelter is an extension of power to impose their will through doctrinal statements, even over the views of whatever individual Catholics work there. If you don’t want to be discriminated against? Tough luck, it’s their religious freedom to own a plurality of services and deny care based on that. They wish to preserve your human dignity and will therefore not offer such treatments. Have you, perhaps, been to confession recently?

The church’s seeming contradictions, its opposition to the policies of other reactionary groups, make far more sense when you understand that to the Catholic Church there is no contradiction at all between their pastoral care for immigrant populations being abused by the state and their outright persecution of LGBT+ populations.

To the church, an immigrant being denied the eucharist and a trans woman asserting her identity both represent violations of the sacred dignity of the individual to exist as God intended for them. To the Church, denial of transgender care is moral, a natural consequence of an utterly ancient theology around gender and sexuality being applied to whatever the sinners are up to today, whatever the cost to human lives.

As far as the church is concerned, it is simply restating what it has always believed: that men are qualified to lead, women are qualified to follow, the sole purpose of sex is to produce more Catholics, the only valid way to have sex is with an opposite-sex partner you have married the way they say you should.

Have your children at a Catholic hospital, send them to a Catholic school, reprimand them for having strange ideas like homosexuality or transgender identity or ordination of women, celebrate their marriages, their children, and when you die, be buried in a Catholic cemetery, and know that you lived in the only valid way: no official theocracy needed, not when it’s been able to do this all under the auspices of liberal democracy that’s fine with plenty of de facto tyranny in practice. One just has to look at Michigan walking back their ban on conversion therapy following pressure from Catholic organizations.

Why am I so completely confident that this will not change? Hasn’t the Catholic Church changed its doctrine before? Why, yes! It has, in fact, changed its doctrine. Vatican II, one of the most important overhauls of the Catholic Church’s doctrine, happened after multiple decades of theological agitation. It’s often cited as proof that the church can become more progressive, but that’s not really accurate.

The full story is far too long to get into here, but it is sufficient to say that Vatican II basically declared three points: don’t hate other religions (as much), use the local language instead of Latin, and maybe try to be more friendly with other Christians to unify political power.

Both during and in the years after Vatican II, the most virulent parts of Catholic antisemitism (such as the Good Friday prayer for the salvation of the ‘Faithless [Perfidis] Jews’) were trimmed away, reworded, or otherwise removed, the structure of the church was reworked, and ecumenism was increasingly emphasized.

It should be understood that the Second Vatican Council was not an attempt at liberalization, but instead an attempt to shore up Christian authority in a rapidly secularizing world; as the council itself put it: “All…[Christian Denominations]…long for the one visible Church of God, a Church truly universal…that the world may be converted to the Gospel.”

And the Second Vatican Council has been loathed for it ever since by the traditional-hardliner wings of the Catholic Church. The primary, and perhaps most important reason why the Catholic Church will not change its doctrines on gender and sexuality, will continue to oppress women, queer people, trans people, and hurting all others who may not conform to their strictures, is because they already know that something like Vatican II spread spiderweb-cracks across the unity of the church.

One such crack recently became a hole as the entirety of the Society of Saint Pius the 10th (or SSPX) and its approximately 1500 priests were excommunicated — over a direct challenge to papal authority and not, of course, for the repeated scandals involving associations with Neo-Nazis — and as a result, the papacy has suffered a serious blow.

To change the doctrine of complimentarianism, allow the ordination of women, permit marriage between two men, or grant transgender people a full life in the church would be an overturning of doctrine at least as radical as Vatican II, and arguably far more radical overall. I am certain that the pope is watching carefully as the Anglican Church is rocked by controversy and potential schism after the appointment of the first female Archbishop of Canterbury. If you believe the Pope would risk similar, even if he personally considered it morally correct (which we can discount, given statements to the contrary) then I have a cathedral to sell you.

Instead, the Church must be understood as attempting to preserve and maintain its own power. Its own power is reliant on numbers and unity. The SSPX schism represents a fracture in its unity, one they are keen to rectify but not one that requires substantial change to solve.

Removing SSPX is not progress, it is a refusal to tolerate disobedience. Something as massive as the Catholic Church is bound to have internal conflict; we cannot mistake those internal conflicts for proof of change.

Many traditionalist groups remain in the church, antisemitism is still a major problem, but obedience to the pope ensures their safety. With this in mind, it is safe to say that the church is unlikely to do anything which would push even more people out.

We must stop treating the church as though its theology on gender, sexuality, or women is in any way a mere relic of the past. It is a living, breathing, and essential hatred that the church has gilded and polished with beautiful words and lovely phrasings, but it is functionally a far more successful, far more insidious, and far more tolerated way to hold the exact same policy positions as any raving Evangelical who blames faggots for hurricanes and child abuse.

There is far more similarity between the Catholic Church’s teachings on gender and sexuality and the Westboro Baptist’s teachings on gender and sexuality than many people want to admit, and it is inseparable from everything else the Church does, both good and ill.

What practical difference is there between “transgender people are mentally ill people who deserve our compassion as we force them to detransition and deny them the right to marry” and “God hates fags”? Political policy is not the Eucharist: words do not change the fundamental substance.

So, what is there to do? If you oppose an ideology of misogynistic categorization of women as homemakers, homophobic idealization of the man and woman as the sole proper relationship, and transphobic conceptions of humanity as composed of two immutable sexes which can never be altered or changed?

Stop acting like the pope is any better than he really is. “His Holiness” is, at best, a honey-worded promoter of far-right rhetoric who uses soft power to deny care. He is the absolute dictator of the Catholic Church who fully believes himself to be God’s vicar on Earth, the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, holder of the Keys of St. Peter. Anyone who claims that level of authority must be criticized.

Stop praising the Catholic Church and its bishops as though they are not also constantly supporting deeply harmful policies. Even when the church hierarchy does something which may be praiseworthy, opposing the anti-immigration policies of the Trump presidency, you must understand that they are doing so because they are attempting to preserve their own authority and legitimacy, which they then use to press for reactionary policies elsewhere.

The church grows its soft power, and thus its capacity to enforce its will and doctrine upon Catholics and non-Catholics alike, through exploiting gaps in state capacity. Hospitals, charities, homeless shelters, schools, none of these must be run by a theocratic institution. Secular alternatives are being built, liberatory alternatives are being built.

The Catholic Church has historically opposed leftist thought and action, even among its own flock, because when they are the provisioner of education, healthcare, food, shelter, clothing, and hospice care, they can enforce their own will. When people take it for themselves? They have very, very little they can use to force people to do as they say.

The construction of liberatory, independent alternatives to the Catholic Church can be as simple as aiding a local secular food kitchen, as complex as political campaigns to secularize institutions like schools and hospitals. For my part, I believe that mutual aid specifically meant to support people of all kinds in all their needs, is among the most effective ways to defang an institution as large as the church and to stop its abuses from hurting people.

The less the authority of the church is allowed to extend into the lives of the most abused, most needy, most disadvantaged members of society, the less the church is capable of harming people. This is universal: I cannot speak for every nation or country, but the Catholic Church is almost certainly up to something where you live. It’s worth looking into what has happened in your local diocese, what alternatives exist, and how you can help out.

Activism against the church is difficult. Catholicism places itself as the sole moral authority for its laity, and its strict hierarchy and internal politics means that there’s a culture of deference to authority and careerism which leads many to silence from within. From without, criticism of religious institutions is often met with discomfort or indifference, the perception of an edgy internet atheist when someone speaks about the genuine, well-documented horror of the Catholic church abounds.

Quite often, I’ve had conversations devolve into uncomfortable shifting and “well, it’s their right to believe what they want” non-responses.

And yet, it can be successful. Hospitals which are struggling financially and targeted for acquisition by the Catholic Church, have been the subject of anticlerical activism which can be successful, when the realities of a Catholic takeover of vital services are shown to residents and the full implications of what is happening is known.

The church is reliant upon its good image. It is reliant upon people assuming good faith from them. Deprive them of that, force them into the light, confront them and you can oppose the takeover of a hospital, the denial of care, the extension of theocratic power.

The arguments against the church are self-evident once you strip away the veneer of deferential respect an institution like it has. Restriction to abortion access, to transgender healthcare, to contraceptives, to every basic right of bodily autonomy that they consider against the will of God.

It is not the right of any institution to deprive human beings of their ability to live, breathe, experience joy, and feel the full range of human experiences. In their bleating about dignity, the church constantly finds ways to make lives worse, less dignified, more dependent upon their power. This is the insidious cruelty of the Catholic church, that it knows precisely what the left and right hand does. It deprives and provides at the same time, it hurts and heals, it stands alongside and it presses the boot down at once. All of it is in service of the power of an elite group of reactionaries.

There are, of course, groups within the Catholic church which oppose its current doctrines: Catholics for Choice (who oppose the church’s stance on reproductive rights), Dignity USA (which promotes LGBT rights) both agitate against the present dogma and excommunications for ordinations of women are not unheard of.

However, none of these organizations within the church are near any levers of power, and grassroots movements are typically far more successful at getting new saints made than major doctrinal reforms put through. I am often left wondering how much these progressive sections of the church’s faithful serve to further promote the harmful agendas of the broader institution by funnelling energy away from direct confrontation.

There are also institutions which critique and track the activities of the Catholic church. BishopAccountability tracks the many, many, many bishops and priests which have been accused of sexual assault, but it admits that it can only do so much. Previous reporting on Trans News Network has covered the horror inflicted upon queer people across the United States. Finding reports on financial shadiness is trivial, particularly among the more radical and traditional elements of the church. Yet, Leo continues to be the subject of articles which report on his words without criticism or reflection or investigation, presenting an image of a church which is saying and doing the right thing when it clearly is not.

To be a bit coy: we all know it’s bullshit propaganda when an article starts with “Elon Musk says…” and yet the same dismissal does not apply to a man with far more direct authority and control over one of the largest, wealthiest organizations in the world. When an article’s headline says “The pope says…” we should recognize boilerplate statements and inaction for what they are, and where there are substantive actions, to look at it within full context.

Criticism of the church should not be controversial. It was not controversial quite recently, as the church was rocked by scandals before Francis. Recognize that very little has changed, and that the church hierarchy is very keen for you to believe otherwise. It should be simple, easy, and accepted to point out that the sprawling institution which has engaged in close collaboration with far right governments across the world, which only kicked out members for disobedience and not intense antisemitism, which regularly condemns queer identity and life, which covers up the sexual abuse of children, which denies the right of women to participate in leadership, which claims moral authority above the laws of any nation, is perhaps not the ally to progressive causes that some of its recent statements may suggest. To criticize the Church openly is the first step.

The next step must be to stop it from hurting more people.

To stop the harms perpetuated by the Catholic Church requires we understand what it says when it talks about universal dignity, about God’s plan, about the roles of man and woman, about gender ideology. It requires understanding that the contradictions are only there when you consider them as fundamentally progressive or even ‘improving.’ It requires that we stop treating an institution with deference and worshipful grace–the irony of which is not lost on me–and we look at it with the same harsh gaze as other religious organizations we recognize as obviously cruel and to respond to its actions accordingly.

Edited by David Forbes

SJ Klapecki (she/her) is a writer who works in a multitude of mediums. Alongside writing queer and religiously-tinged science fiction and fantasy, she hosts the film and theology podcast Lox Romana and is the head writer for the tabletop studio Sword and Board Games.