Personal Identity and Peace

That little dickens Pope Francis is at it again, twittering and tweeting.

It occurs to me that Francis, unlike Trump, probably does not write his own tweets. Certainly not in English. Still, I wish someone would confiscate the smartphone.

Here’s the latest:

So what does it mean? How do you “violate” someone in their “personal identity”? By forgetting their name?
Given the pronouns “his” and “her,” I hope he means not calling women women, or men, men. Would that be too much to hope?

But there are a lot of other possibilities, and just about all of them are problems for Catholic theology.

More fundamentally, it is bad practice to stress the notion of “personal identity.” It ought not to be all about me. Nor about the silly roles society assigns us. There is, after all, no man or woman, no Jew nor Greek, nor Samaritan, in Christ.

We are children of God, brothers and sisters, and it is our unity which ought to be emphasized.

Whatever he meant, it is unhelpful to sow woodland herrings in this way.