Bishop of Bilbao in the Assumption: There is no identity without reference to the body with which we were born

The Bishop of Bilbao (Spain), Bishop Joseba Segura, highlighted on the day of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary that personal identity cannot be built without referring to “the body with which we were born.”

This was indicated by the prelate in the Mass that he presided at in the Basilica of Begoña in Bilbao, in the Mass that he presided over before a large number of faithful who came to the temple to celebrate the feast of the Mother of God.

“Belief in the Assumption of the Virgin Mary teaches us that the human body is something good, essential to our being. We are not and will not be angels. “God has made us body and spirit, and in eternity we will continue to be that too,” the bishop recalled, according to the website of the diocese of Bilbao.

After pointing out that Catholicism is “the only religion that affirms that God became flesh, something that the others consider absurd and anathema,” Bishop Segura warned that “we live in a peculiar time. While the cult of the beautiful body spreads, with its diets, gyms and plastic surgeries, at the same time it is questioned whether that same body can impose restrictions and limits on our will to be whatever we want to be.

In that sense, he warned, “it is as if the body does not matter, as if one could construct one’s identity, being a man or a woman or anything in between, or none of them, at will, without reference to the body with which we were born.” .

“It is one thing to recognize the dissatisfaction and suffering of some people with their body, and quite another to try to impose the idea that the body has nothing to say. A freedom to be is preached, which nothing must prove or justify, as if, indeed, pure desire were capable of creating reality,” he continued.

The Spanish prelate remarked that, in this context, “we are told: you can be whatever you want, but that is not the case because if that were the case, the Athletic (Bilbao) star pool, male and female, would never be lacking. of candidates.”

“Our body is part of our being, tall or short, fat or skinny, flaccid or muscular. And finally our desire to be able to do with it whatever we want has to face the last limit: our mortality,” she highlighted.

On the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, said the Bishop of Bilbao, “we celebrate that we are mortal: mortality that is final rest, that is fulfillment, that is a limited horizon and that is why the urgency to take advantage of the days and hours and enjoy of them as much as possible.”

The Catholic Church and gender ideology

Although the prelate did not mention it directly, what was pointed out in his homily has to do with gender ideology, a current that considers that biological sex is not determining for the person, but rather that each person can define their sexual orientation and identity according to to their preferences and even against their nature.

On April 8, 2024, the Vatican published the document Infinite dignityin which it warns of 13 “serious violations” of human dignity.

“Wanting to dispose of oneself, as gender theory prescribes, without taking into account this fundamental truth of human life as a gift, means nothing other than giving in to the old temptation for the human being to become God and enter into competition with the true God of love who reveals the Gospel to us,” warns the Vatican text.

On several occasions, Pope Francis has warned about the dangers of gender ideology, such as when in March of this year he spoke at the international conference Man-Woman Image of God. For an anthropology of vocationswhich took place in Rome.

On that occasion, the Holy Father indicated that he had requested the carrying out of “studies on this ugly ideology of our time, which erases differences and makes everything the same; erasing difference is erasing humanity.”

A year earlier, on March 10, 2023, Pope Francis told the Argentine newspaper The Nation that “gender ideology, at this moment, is one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations. It goes beyond the sexual. Why is it dangerous? Because it dilutes the differences, and the richness of men and women and of all humanity.”

In October 2016, upon returning to Rome from his trip to Georgia and Azerbaijan, the Holy Father warned that indoctrinating with gender ideology is “evil.”