Avvenire’s defense of “gender identity” among minors exposes the crisis of faith and reason in Italy’s Catholic establishment.
Newsroom (14/01/2026 Gaudium Press ) What happens when the newspaper of a nation’s bishops forgets to speak as the Church? Avvenire, the well-funded but thinly read daily of the Italian Episcopal Conference, has become the mirror of Catholicism’s internal disarray. Its latest front-page feature, penned by Luciano Moia, is less an article than a manifesto—one that elevates feeling above truth and personal relief above moral law.
Titled “How to Raise a Child Who Cannot Recognize Themselves in Their Own Body,” the piece claims to avoid “ideological judgments.” In reality, it embodies ideology: it adopts the lexicon of “gender identity,” erases theological vocabulary, and sanctifies uncertainty as virtue. What emerges is not Catholic journalism but catechesis in relativism, complete with pastoral sentimentality and doctrinal amnesia.
From La Spezia to Babel
Moia builds his argument around a 13-year-old from La Spezia whose birth certificate was modified by court order to reflect an “elected name” and “gender identity.” The facts are scarcely known—no one at Avvenire has seen the medical reports—but that does not prevent the case from becoming a symbol of what the author deems a new “pastoral challenge.”
The problem is not reporting the case. The problem is what follows: a complete silence on the moral and anthropological teaching of the Church. Instead of light, the reader receives fog. Instead of doctrine, anecdotes. It is Christianity without creed—a pastoralism free of the Cross.
Two Mothers, One Dogma: Feeling as Truth
Moia contrasts two stories: one mother urging caution, another celebrating transition. At first glance, the dual narrative seems balanced. But like all carefully staged dialectics, the conclusion is foregone. The only sin left is “judgment.” The highest good is “serenity.”
In this new moral order, truth about the human person—“male and female He created them”—is quietly dethroned. Biology becomes a suggestion. Experience becomes revelation. And the act of discernment, core to Christian conscience, is reduced to a kind of spiritual voyeurism: observing feelings without naming right or wrong.
The mother who resists transition cites science, invoking research that most adolescent confusion resolves naturally. But her caution, in Moia’s framing, appears almost reactionary next to the other mother’s story of “liberation.” Under the humanitarian varnish, the message is clear: those who uphold nature are the new Pharisees.
The Mysticism of Ethical Phenomenology
The real theology of Avvenire today is not Thomistic but phenomenological. It is the cult of fact over principle: “what is, is good.” The newspaper treats each human story as self-justifying, every subjective state as morally sovereign.
Under this mindset, there is no objective truth about man and woman, only lived experience waiting to be validated. The phrase “listen before we judge” becomes a moral anesthetic: silence first, silence always. But the Church’s task was never silence—it was proclamation.
Doctrine Erased in the Name of Empathy
Not one line of Moia’s essay acknowledges Catholic teaching on creation, natural law, or the unity of body and soul. No quotation from Scripture, no whisper of the Magisterium, no reference to moral principle appears. The foundations of faith are treated as impolite intrusions into the new pastoral discourse.
In their place stands the ambiguous language of the synodal process—“accompaniment,” “recognition,” “support.” Noble words, now worn thin by misuse. To accompany someone while denying the truth about their nature is not mercy; it is complicity.
From Catholicism to Catechisms of Ambiguity
What Avvenire offers is not journalism, and not even theology—it is the public relations arm of moral inversion. Wrapped in the appeal of compassion, it preaches a new orthodoxy where the sole heresy is certainty.
It is telling that a newspaper owned by the bishops can produce essays that amputate the very doctrine those bishops are sworn to defend. Avvenire no longer illuminates; it seduces. It replaces the light of revelation with the soft glow of human emotion.
When a “Catholic” newspaper adopts the language of ideological lobbies, it ceases to evangelize and begins to proselytize—for relativism. In this, the confusion of the Italian Church finds its perfect mirror: a faith emptied of truth, a compassion without God, and a silence where the Word should speak.
- Raju Hasmukh with files form Infovaticana
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