Dutch Cardinal Willem Eijk has asked for Pope Francis to issue an encyclical about gender theory, which he said “is being pushed in all kinds of organisations and we as a Church have not said much about it.”
Eijk, the Archbishop of Utrecht, spoke during an ad limina visit of 10 Dutch bishops. They had a friendly meeting with the Pope but did not discuss the encyclical idea with him.
The Vatican condemned gender theory in a 2019 document that called it an attempt to “annihilate nature.” Pope Francis did not sign the document but has denounced the idea of fluid genders on several occasions.
After meeting Cardinal Kevin Farrell, prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life, the conservative Dutch cardinal told journalists: “I have asked whether it would not be good if the Pope published an encyclical on gender thinking.”
“He (Farrell) can report my request to the Pope,” he added.
According to Eijk, men’s and women’s roles can evolve culturally but there remained “an essential relationship between biological sexuality and the gender role.” He noted that Farrell was joined at the meeting “by a priest and three women in high positions” in the Vatican.
Bishop Jan Hendriks of Haarlem-Amsterdam said Cardinal Farrell did not want to discuss “matters concerning medical ethics and sexuality” and did not respond to Eijk's request.
The role of women in the Church did not come up in the meetings with various dicasteries, Bishop Gerard de Korte of ’s-Hertogenbosch said.
The bishops’ ad limina report to the Vatican painted a bleak picture of a shrinking Church in the highly secular Netherlands. Catholics slumped from 28.4 per cent of the Dutch population in 2004 to 20.8 per cent last year.
But the prelates discovered in Rome that the Vatican still considered the respected Radboud University in Nijmegen as Catholic, even though they had stripped it of that title in 2020.
Becoming ever more secular, the former Catholic University of Nijmegen changed its name in 2004. In 2020, the bishops removed its Catholic status after a dispute about appointing university leaders.
“Rome has the last word,” remarked Cardinal Eijk. Bishop de Korte is now negotiating what this means with the university, which wants to keep the “Catholic” label.
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