The National Catholic Reporter says the comments were made in a new book published called Pope Francis: This Economy Kills, which calls on Christians to preserve God’s order of creation.

In an interview with veteran Italian journalists Andrea Tornielli and Giacomo Galeazzi, the pope compares genetic manipulation and nuclear weapons with gender theory, a broad term for how people learn to identify themselves sexually and how it’s transmitted culturally.

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“Let’s think of the nuclear arms, of the possibility to annihilate in a few instants a very high number of human beings,” the pope says. “Let’s think also of genetic manipulation, of the manipulation of life, or of the gender theory, that does not recognize the order of creation.”

“With this attitude, man commits a new sin, that against God the Creator,” he continues. “The true custody of creation does not have anything to do with the ideologies that consider man like an accident, like a problem to eliminate.”

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On Wednesday, the Vatican gave a group of U.S. gay and lesbian Catholics VIP seats at Pope Francis’ weekly general audience.

But in a sign that the welcome wasn’t all it could have been, the New Ways Ministry pilgrims were only identified on the Vatican’s list of attendees as a “group of lay people accompanied by a Sister of Loretto.”