Lamezia Terme – “Male and female he created them” Biblical anthropology and the gender question is the essay, just released in the bookstore, by Don Emanuele Gigliotti. Presbyter of the Diocese of Lamezia Terme, in addition to being parish priest in Amato, he is administrative director of the diocesan spirituality house Betel Tabor. In the presentation to the document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, “What is man” (Ps 8:5) – An itinerary of biblical anthropology, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, recalling the profound scientific, technological and relational changes that lead to a true social and cultural transformation, signaled the emergence in today’s world of a “different relationship between men and women, with a vision of sexuality in contrast with traditions considered dutiful and consolidated», and the emergence of «questions and behaviors of an anthropological nature which demand to be subjected to a serious discernment». At the center of this context, the presentation reads: “there is the question of sexual or gender identity, often addressed without taking into account the fundamental principles and values of the Jewish-Christian revelation”.
The essay intends to offer “reading keys for making a ‘discernment’ in this regard. The first pages present the essential lines of the gender perspective, especially exemplified by Judith Butler in the work Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. For the scholar, an icon of the extreme movement, the binary difference of the sexes is only a cultural and social product operated by a hegemonic (macho) philosophical (metaphysical) and political discourse that must be replaced by a discourse open to the multiplicity of genders. In a critical sense, one cannot overlook the social and ecclesial repercussions that this radical vision entails, in particular on marriage, generation, family, fatherhood, motherhood and on the same central truth of the Christian faith, the Incarnation, or the assumption of nature human form of the eternal Son of God in the male form, which, in the proposed indifference and multiplicity of genders, would become “unimportant and irrelevant” (CONGREGATION FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE FAITH, Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the collaboration of man and of women in the Church and in the world).
The starting point of the reflection is constituted “by the analysis of some biblical texts from which we derive the vision of man according to God’s plan. This is preceded by a synthetic presentation of the hermeneutical criteria necessary before tackling topics like this, and it is followed by a reflection on the comparison between the biblical message and the gender perspective. At the end of the path taken, the reader is offered a systematic synthesis of the biblical anthropology of sexual identity; it can be declined in four fundamental characteristics: binary alterity created, knowable, “nuptial” and protected. In comparing the two perspectives – biblical anthropological perspective and gender proposal – the respective specificities are highlighted. In comparison, the thought of Pope Francis and Benedict XVI acquires significant weight. The biblical anthropological vision of sexual otherness shows how the anthropology of gender, by denying the binary difference of the sexes, places itself on a different and opposed level to that of biblical revelation”.