Having collected over 7,000 signatures on LifePetitions.com/york-cath-school-board, as well as managing a very effective lobbying campaign on the ground, concerned parents in York were relieved to hear that their Catholic school board voted not to fly the LGBT flag atop its schools during “Pride Month.”

Unsurprisingly however, the promotion of LGBT ideology across our culture already appears to have had a contagion-effect evidenced by the enormous increase of LGBT-identifying youth in society.

With the latest research in America showing that 1 in 5 of Generation Z (born 1997-2003) identify as LGBT, compared to less than 1 in 20 of their parents’ Generation X (born 1965-1980), many parents are understandably worried about the effect of gender theory and LGBT messaging on the impressionable minds of their children.

While academic for some, the lived effect of this cultural shift is stark for those children who, in rapidly increasing numbers, seek out life-changing irreversible surgeries and fertility-damaging puberty-blockers in a way many come to regret. 

The love for people who do experience homosexual inclinations or gender dysphoria needs to be in place of course, but too often it appears our Catholic institutions are more intent on labelling even children according to their desires, rather than guiding often vulnerable individuals towards better decisions.

Chloe Cole is among many ex-trans-identifying youth to have suffered at the hands of medical authorities.

Now 18 and embracing her womanhood, the American is suing the team of doctors who performed “a mutilating, mimicry sex change experiment” on her. 

At 13 and struggling with complex mental health co-morbidities, “(She) needed love, care, attention and regular weekly psychotherapy, not cross sex hormones and mutilating surgery,” according to her lawyers. 

“After being exposed for hours at a time to online transgender influencers, Chloe developed the erroneous idea that she was a boy. When Chloe informed her parents that she thought she was a boy, her parents didn’t know what to do and promptly sought guidance from the Defendants. Defendants immediately affirmed Chloe in her self-diagnosed gender dysphoria. They did not question, elicit or attempt to understand the psychological events that led her to this belief, nor did they seek to evaluate or appreciate her multi-faceted presentation of co-morbid symptoms.”

The parental instinct to defend the well-being of their children is therefore not something onlookers should take lightly or dismiss, particularly given the cultural cost they face for opposing an ever more powerful LGBT lobby that has silenced not a few of its detractors.

Step forward the Catholic bishops into this milieu?

There are many reasons to flee the ongoing battle from a worldly point of view, not least the threat to one’s standing in polite society, but bishops more than most will be aware of the example of the apostles, martyrs and saints in defending and promoting the Christian understanding of marriage and sexuality.

One need only consider St. John the Baptist’s decapitation for upholding the truth about marriage, or Our Lord’s stern warning against causing children to stumble (Mark 9:42), to grasp that our bishops are very much called to lend their weight to the pushback against LGBT ideology in schools.

Indeed the ongoing boycotts of Bud Light, Target and North Face is another indication that much of the public are wary of children being further exposed to LGBT advertising.

Whereas some might surmise that bishops joining the conversation would be counter-productive and only frame the issue as a religious one, they risk ignoring that the dominance of the LGBT ideology in society was only made possible in the first place by the erosion of religion in the west and the concomitant reluctance of its Christian leaders to stand boldly in the public square against the sexual revolution.

It is the silence of Church leaders that St. Catherine of Siena railed so strongly against during the turbulent Avignon years, insisting that her contemporaries “had enough exhortations to be silent.” 

“Cry out with a thousand tongues — I see the world is rotten because of silence,” she said.

This type of clarion call might be as jarring for some today as it was in the 14th century, but such are the stakes for Catholic parents and their children when faced with issues of this gravity. 

(Tim Jackson is director of data for LifeSiteNews