On Monday, the Vatican compared death and operation to grave human rights violations, putting them on par with pregnancy and death, which reject God’s strategy for human life.
The Vatican’s theory office issued “Eternal Dignity,” a 20-page declaration that has been in the works for five decades. After considerable revision in recent months, it was approved March 25 by Pope Francis, who ordered its release.
The record was a loss for trans Catholics because it was a bishop who has made referral to the LGBTQ+ neighborhood a hallmark of his pope. However, its message was also in line with the Brazilian Jesuit’s long-held conviction that transgender people may be accepted in the church but never so-called “gender ideologies.”
In its most gladly anticipated area, the Vatican repeated its rejection of “gender idea,” or the idea that person’s biological sex is change. It stated that God created man and girl as distinct biological people and that no one should try to “make oneself God” or stick with that.
“It follows that any intercourse-change treatment, as a rule, risks threatening the special respect the person has received from the moment of conception,” the document said.
It distinguished between gender-affirming clinics, which it rejected, and “genital anomalies” that are present at birth or that grow afterward. Those defects may become “resolved” with the help of health care professionals, it said.
Activists for LGBTQ+ Catholics soon criticized the report as outdated, dangerous and contrary to the expressed purpose of recognizing the “infinite respect” of all of God’s children. They warned it could have real-world effects on trans people, fueling anti-trans violence and discrimination.
“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.
The document’s existence, rumored since 2019, was confirmed in recent weeks by the new prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Argentine Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, a close Francis confidant.
After he authored a more potent document approving blessings for same-sex couples that sparked criticism from conservative bishops all over the world, especially in Africa, Fernandez had cast the document as a bit of a nod to conservatives.
And yet, in an apparent attempt at balance, the document takes pointed aim at countries— including many in Africa— that criminalize homosexuality. It echoed Francis’ claim that “being homosexual is not a crime” in a 2023 interview with The Associated Press.
The new document denounces “as contrary to human dignity the fact that, in some places, not a few people are imprisoned, tortured, and even deprived of the good of life solely because of their sexual orientation”.
Fernandez expressed his hope that the new document’s content would be as well-known as the one about gay blessings, which he claimed had been viewed on the internet by 7 billion people.
When asked how its criticism of trans people matched Francis’ message of welcome, Fernández said the welcome was still present but that the pope fervently believed that the idea of gender being fluid “appeases the vision” of a man and woman coming together to create new life.
The document is essentially a rehash of previously stated Vatican positions, seen now through the lens 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.
It asserts that surrogacy violates both the child’s dignity and that of the surrogate mother in a recently articulated position.
While much attention has been paid to the potential exploitation of poor women as surrogates, the Vatican document claims that the child has the right to have a fully human (and not artificially induced) birth and to receive the gift of a life that exhibits both the dignity of the giver and the receiver.
According to the statement, “The legitimate desire to have a child cannot be transformed into a “right to a child” that disregards the dignity of the child as the recipient of the gift of life.”
In 2019, the Congregation for Catholic Education insisted on the complementarity of biologically male and female sex organs to create new life and rejected the idea that people could choose or change their gender. The Vatican had previously published its most eloquent position on gender.
The more reputable Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s new document uses that year’s 2019 education document, but it modifies the tone. Insignificantly, it doesn’t repeat the Vatican’s position that homosexual behavior is “intrinsically disordered” but that homosexual people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.
In a news conference to introduce the document, Fernández acknowledged that the “intrinsically disordered” language was very strong. He suggested that there might be a more effective way to “with other words” express the church’s desire for sex to bring about new life in the marriage.
The Rev. James Martin, who has called for the Catholic Church to extend greater outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics, said the gender message was similar to past declarations. However, he applauded the law and the use of violence against LGBTQ+ people.
That is not unacceptable because it violates human dignity to repeat it too frequently. The LGBTQ person, like everyone else, has infinite dignity”, he said in an email.
Francis has advocated for transgender people, including trans sex workers, and urged that the Catholic Church welcome all of their children.
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 criticized specifically what he refers to as the “ideological colonization” of the West in developing nations, where development aid is occasionally preconditioned on adopting Western conceptions of gender.
Transgender activists immediately criticized the document as “hurtful” and devoid of the voices and experiences of actual trans people, especially in the distinction it makes between surgeries that affirm gender and those that target intersex people.
The notion that gender-affirming health care, which has saved the lives of so many wonderful trans people and allowed them to live in harmony with their bodies, their communities, and (God) might risk or diminish trans people’s dignity is hurtful and dangerously ignorant, according to Mara Klein, a nonbinary, transgender activist who has participated in Germany’s church reform project.
“Seeing that, in contrast, surgical interventions on intersex people, which are frequently performed without consent, especially on minors, often cause immense physical and psychological harm for many intersex people dating,” Klein said.”Seeing that, in contrast, surgical interventions on intersex people are evaluated positively just seems to show the underlying hypocrisy even more,” Klein said.
The publication comes at a time when there is some outcry against transgender people, including in the United States where Republican-led state legislatures are considering a new round of legislation that would restrict access to medical care for transgender youths and, in some cases, transgender adults.
We are confronted with a church that ignores the beauty of creation that can be seen in our biographies, Klein wrote in an email.
