The Good News About God’s Plan: A Pastoral Letter on the Challenges of Gender Identity

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

When the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council wrote about the Church’s relation to the modern world, they began with this key truth: “The joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the men of our time, especially of those who are poor or afflicted in any way, are the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well.” The challenges of everyone in our society are near to my heart and the hearts of all the Catholic faithful in the Archdiocese of Detroit. As your shepherd, your spiritual father, and your brother on the path of discipleship, I share with you the concerns and challenges that you face in your families and, more broadly, in our culture. As a people of faith, we know that Christ desires to speak his truth and love into all cultural challenges in our society.

Among the most pressing challenges we face in contemporary society is how to rightly understand the human person according to God’s plan. What does it mean to be a person? Am I good? Does God love me just as I am? What does it mean to be a man or woman? Is one’s identity as a man or woman immutable and unchanging, or are gender and sex socially constructed or malleable realities that can shift with one’s self-understanding? If I feel that my gender does not match the sex of my body, what am I to do? And finally, how should we, as the People of God in southeast Michigan, respond to these challenges so that the light of the Gospel shines on the darkness of confusion?

I share this letter out of deep pastoral concern for all of you and with these many questions in mind. I am especially mindful of those who assist in leading our parishes and schools, as well as parents of children who experience distress about their bodies or confusion about their gender. My aim is to share the Good News of the Gospel and the beauty of what God intended in his creation. At Synod 16 and in Unleash the Gospel, our local Church committed to a missionary conversion by "making one’s relationship with Jesus and alignment with his will the central guiding principle of every aspect of life." This is a call for each of us to be actively engaged in the evangelizing mission of the Church to testify to the dignity given us by our creation in God’s image and likeness.

Our baptism makes us adopted children of God, and as such our response is always to “fix our eyes on Jesus” (Heb 12:2) as the source of truth and light in our lives. That is why I chose this phrase as my episcopal motto. Whenever we feel lost or confused, it is right that we turn our eyes to Jesus, not with a quick glance, but to fix our eyes on him, knowing that “only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.” When St. John Paul II began his teachings on the human person and sexuality – which composed a “theology of the body” – he began with the words Jesus used when the Pharisees questioned him about a cultural issue of their time. He pointed them to “the beginning”: to the creation account in the first chapters of Genesis. So, it is right for us to begin there, too.

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