"Gender identity is an issue that the education committee has begun discussing, but at this time, there isn't anything to release," Chieko Noguchi, director of public affairs for the U.S. bishop's conference, told CNA in response to questions about whether the national bishops' conference plans to issue nationwide guidelines.
Noguchi added that because the bishops' committee meetings are private, she could not comment on whether the bishop have already begun working on a document on transgenderism.
According to The Catholic Spirit, Minnesota bishops and the state Catholic conference began working on statewide guidelines in 2015, when Pope Francis began addressing the issue of gender identity in his encyclicals and exhortations.
The state's bishops officially adopted the guidelines in June 2019, the same month that the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education released a document entitled "Male and Female He Created Them," which denounced so-called gender theory and affirmed the principles of human dignity, difference, and complementarity.
"The denial of this (male-female) duality not only erases the vision of human beings as the fruit of an act of creation but creates the idea of the human person as a sort of abstraction who 'chooses for himself what his nature is to be,'" the Vatican document stated.
CNA asked the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis why the guidelines were publicly released 8 months after they were adopted, but has not received comment as of press time.
Auxiliary Bishop Andrew Cozzens of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis said at the introduction of Minnesota's guidelines in February that he has had personal conversations with family members of those who identify as transgender, and that he knows the issue can be painful for those involved, The Catholic Spirit reported.
"A lot of times, when we're in pain, we look for quick answers for that pain, and the culture wants to provide quick answers for that pain, but we know that the quick answer for that pain doesn't ultimately bring healing," Cozzens said.
"One of the things we have to do in our pastoral care is be willing to stand with people in their pain, and walk with them with an eye toward the greater good."
According to The Catholic Spirit, Cozzens, who serves as the archdiocese's vicar for Catholic education, said he and the state's other bishops wanted to provide "practical clarity" on this issue to the parents who send their children to Catholic school and expect that they will be taught the truth according to the Catholic faith.
"(A)nd we knew that we had to do this in a way that's calling people to a higher standard of these truths than our culture currently is, to help people get beyond the ideology and to the truth of who they are."
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Mary Farrow worked as a staff writer for Catholic News Agency until 2020. She has a degree in journalism and English education from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.