The Vatican has issued a major statement that strongly condemns transgender surgeries and says that “gender ideology” has no place in the Church.
“It follows that any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception,” the document, titled “Infinite Dignity,” said. The Church called gender surgeries and surrogacy “grave violations of human dignity.”
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The document was written by the prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Argentine Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, a close Francis advisor.
The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) is the highest authority in the Vatican on matters of right and wrong, good and evil. It’s not especially surprising that such a strong statement opposing transgender surgeries would be issued, considering the previous teachings of the Church. But Pope Francis has been seen as “welcoming” LGBTQ people, even allowing for the blessing of same-sex couples.
The statement certainly disappointed the LGBTQ lobby.
“While it lays out a wonderful rationale for why each human being, regardless of condition in life, must be respected, honored, and loved, it does not apply this principle to gender-diverse people,” said Francis DeBernardo of New Ways Ministry, which advocates for LGBTQ Catholics.
“I think the main difficulty faced by the document is that it attempts to affirm the church’s authentic commitment to human dignity in the face of a troubling history on the part of the church itself around attacks on that dignity,” said Nicolete Burbach, a trans-Catholic and an expert in social and environmental justice at the London Jesuit Centre.
The document is something of a repackaging of previously articulated Vatican positions, read now through the prism of human dignity. It restates well-known Catholic doctrine opposing abortion and euthanasia, and adds to the list some of Francis’ main concerns as pope: the threats to human dignity posed by poverty, war, human trafficking, the death penalty and forced migration.
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Interestingly, the document differentiates between “gender-affirming surgery” and surgery to repair “genital abnormalities” that are present at birth or develop later. The LGBTQ jumped on that difference, claiming it set a double standard.
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Also, for the first time, the Vatican condemned surrogate births because they violated the dignity of both the surrogate mother and the child. The Vatican says that a surrogate child “has the right to have a fully human (and not artificially induced) origin and to receive the gift of a life that manifests both the dignity of the giver and that of the receiver.”
“Considering this, the legitimate desire to have a child cannot be transformed into a ‘right to a child’ that fails to respect the dignity of that child as the recipient of the gift of life,” the document said.
Asked how its negative take on trans people squared with Francis’ message of welcome, Fernández said the welcome remained but that the pope fervently believed that the idea that gender was fluid “rather than helping to recognize dignity, impoverishes the vision” of a man and woman coming together to create new life.
Francis is no weak sister when it comes to condemning “gender ideology,” which he calls “the worst danger facing humanity today.”
But he has also denounced “gender theory” as the “worst danger” facing humanity today, an “ugly ideology” that threatens to cancel out God-given differences between man and woman. He has blasted in particular what he calls the “ideological colonization” of the West in the developing world, where development aid is sometimes conditioned on adopting Western ideas about gender.
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As with abortion, Francis has little choice but to stand up and proclaim that gender ideology violates Church teachings on the dignity of man. Even a liberal pope must bow to tradition and the Church’s teachings.