Does Catechism 370 (God is neither male nor female, pure spirit) disprove that God is ontologically male?
A viewer named Lucas follows up on whether God is male by citing Catechism paragraph 370, which states that in no way is God in man's image, that he is neither man nor woman, and that God is pure spirit in which there is no place for the difference between the sexes.
Answer
If you are going to use the word 'sexes,' that is different from gender. Yes, God is not like mankind in having a separate sex with genital organs, but that does not exclude gender. The statement that there is no place for a difference between the sexes has no footnote, no authority in the tradition or magisterium cited, and there must not be one, or he would have quoted it. So let me give a general warning: when you read the 1997 Catechism, anything on esoteric, speculative, or social subjects you have to take with a grain of salt. The man who wrote it, Cardinal Schonborn, is a known liberal who today believes in LGBTQ ideas, and when the French edition first came out there were about a dozen blatant errors in it. When I wrote my book on supersessionism, there were about a half dozen places in the Catechism suggesting the Jews have their own covenant with God, which the Church never believed. Never take the Catechism as the infallible teaching of the Church; not one statement in it is formally infallible, and it does make mistakes, like saying the Muslims worship the same God we do. God is ontologically male, which is why we call him Father, why all the angels have male names, Michael and Gabriel, not Michaela and Gabriela, and why Elohim in Genesis 1 is masculine. You do not need sexual organs to be male; that is the whole point of ontology. So the metaphors in Scripture of God as a caring mother are analogies of his action, not a statement that God is neuter and can be called female.