Well, this was inevitable. It was only a matter of time before Leftist Christians, marinating in the relentless insanity of their pet causes, would fashion gods in their own image: trans, queer, woke, and whatever else the Left is idolizing. The Church of St. Paul the Apostle, a Roman Catholic parish on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, has shown itself to be only too happy to forsake the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob for the Left’s idols of the moment, so it was the perfect place for a recent exhibit celebrating everything the Left cherishes most: narcissism, perversion, delusion, and madness. The church has put up an exhibit entitled “God is Trans: A Queer Spiritual Journey.”
One never knows in these heady days of the woke Pope Francis, but this exhibit seems to run directly contrary to the Catholic Church’s position on these matters. Back in 2019, the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education issued a document entitled “‘Male and Female He Created Them’: Towards a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education.” It stated that the transgender ideology was a “fictitious construct” and that the ideas of “intersex” or “transgender” led to “a masculinity or femininity that is ambiguous, even though (in a self-contradictory way), these concepts themselves actually presuppose the very sexual difference that they propose to negate or supersede.”
The Vatican added that transgenderism “has the effect of obscuring the fact that a person’s sex is a structural determinant of male or female identity.” In other words, you were born a boy or a girl. Your gender identity was not, as the fashionable parlance would have it, “assigned” to you. This is common-sense stuff, which is rare enough these days, and it didn’t fly at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle.
The UK’s Daily Mail reported Monday that the exhibit, which was created by an artist named Adah Unachukwu, “features somewhat abstract colorful paintings which appear to show where the personal meet[s] the spiritual, with videos of the artist among more traditional holy imagery.” That sounds innocuous enough, but the exhibit itself actually states: “God is Trans maps the queer spiritual journey by three significant points: Sacrifice, Identity and Communion.” One painting, Sacrifice, addresses “the need to shed an old life and personhood in order to be able to focus on your spiritual need. There is no devil, just past selves.”
That last bit goes way beyond even what the advocates of transgender madness have asserted before. We’re told that calling a man who has decided he is a woman by his old male name is the unacceptable sin of “deadnaming,” but now at St. Paul’s, the former self of a person suffering from transgender madness is not just dead, but demonic. And the rest of the statement, about shedding the old life and personhood, is a woke caricature of the actual Christian faith, and of Jesus’ statement: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” (Matthew 16:24)
The exhibit inadvertently pointed up its own narcissism and self-absorption in saying: “What does holiness look like? What does your god look like? Are those two portrayals that can be merged?” The answer for the Left is that their god looks exactly like them, as they have made themselves into gods in claiming that sex is “assigned,” not embedded in every cell, and can be changed at will.
Related: Duke Divinity School Students: ‘God Is Queer’
Not everyone was thrilled with this idolatry. The New York Post reported Sunday that one parishioner declared: “The church should not be promoting this. I understand there are transgender people. I pray for all people but enough is enough. It seems like they are trying to force the agenda on others.” Gee, ya think? The same person added: “Also, when a friend asked a priest about this they didn’t answer. You can’t put this out on the altar and then hide. That’s what gets the church in trouble.” Indeed. If the clergymen at St. Paul’s are going to embrace and proselytize for woke pseudo-Christianity, they should own up proudly to what it is doing, not skulk around in the shadows hoping to snare the unwary.
This being Manhattan, others were quite happy with the exhibit. One woman said: “I don’t understand the art, but this church is very liberal, which is why I love this church. They are really in the present when others are not.” Great. But the idea of the Church is not to be “in the present,” but to express eternal truths. St. Paul’s has instead opted to push the fashions of the moment, bringing to mind another one of Jesus’ statements: “Leave them; they are blind guides. If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15:14)
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