Progressive Catholicism: The Human Person Reimagined

With this article, we arrive at the third of five in a series exploring what Catholicism becomes if progressive Catholics gain influence. The first article explained how progressive Catholicism shifts the Church from substance to sentiment. The second showed how, under this influence, each person becomes their own magisterium.

This article focuses on perhaps the most significant (and dangerous) change: the redefinition of the human person. Why dangerous? Because instead of affirming God’s design for the human person (telos), progressive Catholicism amplifies the confusion and harm caused by gender ideology. Like broader progressivism, it treats the body not as a revelation of God’s plan, but as raw material to reshape in our own image. That “reshaping” wounds both body and soul.

Specifically:

“Man” and “woman” become social labels, not embodied realities.
Gender self-expression receives affirmation without regard for truth or objective human flourishing.
Catholic schools and parishes use preferred pronouns, honor transitioned names, and treat transition as morally good.
Clergy, parents, and faithful Catholics who uphold Church teaching face suppression.

First, let’s review God’s plan for the human person.

The Church’s Teaching: Personhood as Gift, Not Project

Genesis 1:27 declares, ‘Male and female He created them.’ Catholicism teaches that each person exists as a unity of body and soul. God gives us our sex—it is not a fluid construct but part of our nature. The Catechism reaffirms this telos in paragraphs 2332 and 2333:

2332 Sexuality affects every aspect of the human person in the unity of body and soul. It influences affectivity, the capacity to love and procreate, and the aptitude for forming bonds of communion.

2333 Everyone, male and female, must acknowledge and accept their sexual identity. Physical, moral, and spiritual differences and complementarity serve the goods of marriage and family life. Harmony within couples and society depends, in part, on how each sex lives out this complementarity, need, and mutual support.

St. Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body expands on the divine purpose of the body. In a 1979 General Audience, he taught:

We find ourselves, therefore, almost at the very core of the anthropological reality, the name of which is ‘body,’ the human body. However, as can easily be seen, this core is not only anthropological but also essentially theological. Right from the beginning, the theology of the body is bound up with the creation of man in the image of God. It becomes, in a way, also the theology of sex—or rather the theology of masculinity and femininity—which has its starting point here in Genesis.

God made us with bodies for a purpose—not as raw material for self-reinvention.

The Progressive Turn: Reimagining the Human Person

Progressive thinkers (even within the Church) replace God’s telos with internal feelings as the new foundation of truth. They reject the ontological reality of biological sex and reduce male and female to mere social constructs. In this revision, the body no longer reveals divine purpose but exists only to affirm self-assertion.

Organizations like New Ways Ministry and DignityUSA promote this new vision of humanity. For instance, DignityUSA calls the Church’s anthropology “outdated” and “harmful.” One statement reads:

The Church’s moral and ethical doctrine clings to an outdated anthropological position that there are only two mutually exclusive genders and that biological sex is the sole determinant of gender. However, present-day science has challenged this precept.

In response to whether Church leaders have harmed transgender and nonbinary people, they say:

Yes. Over the last several years many Church officials, including Pope Francis, the Vatican, and various bishops, have issued documents and statements that promote a binary view of sex and gender. These statements encourage trans and non-binary persons to accept their bodies and care for them as essential elements of human ecology, rather than believing they have absolute power over creation.

Progressive Catholic theologians mirror this ideology in books like The Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic Anthropology and Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. These works propose a radical reconstruction of Catholic sexual anthropology:

The Sexual Person rejects fixed nature and embraces evolving identity based on flourishing and lived experience.
Just Love replaces natural law with justice, mutuality, and consent.

These books provide a theological on-ramp to progressive ideology that dismantles Catholic teaching on embodiment, complementarity, and natural law. Both have received formal condemnation by the USCCB and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Consequences: Confusion, Harm, and Spiritual Loss

As stated earlier, redefining the human person brings physical and spiritual harm. A Church that affirms gender ideology leads children toward irreversible damage and willful infertility. This reimagining also violates the Eighth Commandment (you shall not bear false witness) by endorsing a lie. Worse, it fosters mortal sin (such as fornication, homosexual acts, and adultery) violating the Sixth Commandment.

We also cannot ignore the saints’ warnings:

The sin of impurity leads the most souls to hell. – St. John Vianney

Though sins of lust are not the gravest, they are especially dangerous because of their strong appeal to the passions and tendency to enslave the soul. – St. Thomas Aquinas

Final Thoughts… Reclaiming the Gift of the Human Person

Progressive Catholics don’t just tinker with language or liturgy—they attack the foundation of what it means to be human. Their ideology replaces God’s design with a self-made identity. They treat the body not as a sign of divine purpose but as a blank canvas for personal reinvention.

St. Pope John Paul II wrote: “The body, and it alone, makes visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine.” Progressive ideology severs that link. It denies the unity of body and soul, discards sexual difference, and elevates internal feelings above truth.

This movement doesn’t reflect compassion—it promotes rebellion against God’s order. The consequences are devastating: confused children, wounded souls, and a Church that exchanges eternal truth for cultural approval.

The Church must decide: proclaim the truth or echo the world’s confusion. Truth calls us to remember:

God creates us male and female.
The body reveals truth, not illusion.
Our identity comes as a gift, not a self-invention.
True love speaks truth—even when it costs something.

The Church must reject this false anthropology. She must defend the truth about the human person—not to win arguments, but to save souls.

Let us reclaim that truth. Let us proclaim it boldly. And let us never forget: affirming the body as God created it means defending both human dignity and eternal destiny.