Nordic Bishops' Statement on Human Sexuality

I’ll be honest when I think about leading Catholic theology of sexuality, I don’t normally think of Nordic countries, i.e., Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland. However, the Scandanavian Bishop’s Conference from these five Nordic countries recently released a letter on the traditional Christian teaching on sexuality, upholding the “embodied integrity of personhood” against modern ideologies of gender and sexuality.

You can read it here. I think it is quite a profound statement that offers a mixture of affirmation of non-discrimination principles, but also a word of caution against the idea that one can create a gender-identity in the image of anything one chooses. The bishops write:

This covenantal sign, the rainbow, is claimed in our time as the symbol of a movement that is at once political and cultural. We recognise all that is noble in this movement’s aspirations. In so far as these speak of the dignity of all human beings and of their longing to be seen, we share them. The Church condemns unjust discrimination of any kind, also on the basis of gender or orientation. We declare dissent, however, when the movement puts forward a view of human nature that abstracts from the embodied integrity of personhood, as if physical gender were accidental. And we protest when such a view is imposed on children as if it were not a daring hypothesis but a proven truth, imposed on minors as a heavy burden of self-determination for which they are not ready. It is curious: our intensely body-conscious society in fact takes the body lightly, refusing to see it as significant of identity, supposing that the only selfhood of consequence is the one produced by subjective self-perception, as we construct ourselves in our own image.

I’m not Catholic, but this is a bold and brave statement with much care and concern for others.

I think the Nordic Bishop’s Statement is much better than the Nashville Statement about sexuality and I offer some reflection and commentary below. Furthermore, I’m hoping my friends in the “Aviary” can chime in and share what they think about the Nordic Bishop’s Statement.