“We cannot force language by completely denaturalizing it for ideological reasons; it doesn’t work that way, languages do not work that way, and so the so-called inclusive language is a kind of aberration within language,” he noted.
Cardinal Fernández weighs in
In 2022, while still archbishop of La Plata, Argentina, the current prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, warned about the “ideological imposition” that “inclusive language” can trigger.
In June of that year, Fernández wrote in a column in the Argentine newspaper La Nación: “Fundamentally, the intention does not seem to be to ‘incorporate everyone’ but to make the very conception of ‘male-female’ disappear. The aim is that what was called ‘sex’ leaves room for a personal construction that ‘fabricates’ the identity that each person comes up with.”
“Destroying the language and expecting everyone to submit to a certain ideology can only be counterproductive and, due to the law of the pendulum, will cause more intolerance and tension,” he warned.
Growing backlash
In 2021, the French Ministry of Education prohibited the use of inclusive language in educational institutions because, according to the Daily Mail, such alterations “are a threat to the language.” The Académie Française, a nearly 400-year-old institution similar to its Spanish counterpart, said inclusive language is “harmful to the practice and understanding” of French.
Uruguay’s National Administration of Public Education, for its part, established restrictions in 2022, determining that “language that conforms to the rules of the Spanish language” must always be used.
The City of Buenos Aires, Argentina, banned inclusive language in 2022, arguing that this variation of the language creates difficulties for students in learning grammatical rules.
Most recently, Argentina’s government, led by recently elected President Javier Milei, extended the ban to all areas of national public administration. The spokesman for office of the president, Manuel Adorni, announced on Feb. 27 that artificial alterations of word endings to make them gender neutral are now prohibited.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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Julieta Villar has a degree in social communication from the National University of La Matanza (Argentina). She began her professional career as an editor at the Argentine Catholic Information Agency (AICA). She has collaborated in graphic press media and communication tasks in civil society organizations. Since October 2022, she has been part of the ACI Prensa team as a correspondent for Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Uruguay.
The Catholic News Agency (CNA) Staff are a team of journalists dedicated to reporting news concerning the Catholic Church around the world. Our bureaus are located in Denver, Washington, and Rome. We have sister language agencies in Kenya, Germany, Peru, Brazil, and Italy. CNA is a service of EWTN News. You can contact us at news@catholicna.com with questions.