Catholic Monk Claims to be Transgender

On Sunday, a Catholic monk in the United States claimed that he is now “transgender.”

As reported by the Daily Caller, 39-year-old Christian Matson, of the Diocese of Lexington in Kentucky, declared himself to be “the first openly transgender person in his position in the Catholic Church.”

“You’ve got to deal with us, because God has called us into this church,” Matson said to the outlet Religion News Service (RNS). “It’s not your church to kick us out of — this is God’s church, and God has called us and engrafted us into it.”

Matson claimed that he first began transitioning in 2006, four years before his conversion to Catholicism. He said that he had been informed by a canon lawyer that marriage and the priesthood would both be “categorically off the table” for him; thus, his only remaining option was to live life as a religious hermit.

He took his vows to be a diocesan hermit in 2022, under Bishop John Stowe. Stowe is a left-wing Catholic who has called for increased acceptance of the LGBTQ agenda within the Catholic Church, despite this being in defiance of the Church’s teachings.

Matson claimed, with no evidence, that his motivation for speaking out was a story he had been told about a “transgender” student who felt that he had been rejected by the Catholic Church.

“I can’t stand by and let this false and, at times, culpably ignorant understanding of what it means to be transgender continue to hurt people,” said Matson.

Matson expressed his anger over Vatican documents that reject “calls for public recognition of the right to choose one’s gender,” including the recent release of “Infinite Dignity,” a document which condemns genital mutilation surgeries, as well as abortion and surrogacy, as violations of the dignity of man. The Vatican declared that such practices contradict with God’s plan for mankind.

“Vatican-level documents that have come out on the subject have not engaged with the science at all,” Matson continued. Declaring himself to be of a higher authority than most in the Church, Matson vowed that “if I don’t say anything and allow the church to continue to make decisions based on incorrect information, then I’m not serving the church.”