With “Infinite Dignity”, a 20-page declaration that has been in the works for five years, the Vatican doctrine office has refused to accept the idea of gender fluidity and defined sex change, transition surgery, and surrogacy as threats to human dignity. This paper puts them on the same level of abortion and euthanasia as practices that reject God’s plan. Pope Francis signed this paper and approved its publication.
According to the document, a person’s birth sex is an “irrevocable gift” from God and “any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception.” Further, it is immoral to give in to temptation to opt for “any sex-change intervention”
The paper goes on to state that men and women were created to be biologically different and people cannot try to “make oneself God.”
Only some “genital abnormalities,” present at birth or developed later, can be “resolved” through surgeries.
The most recent, and sharpest, criticism regards surrogacy, seeing it as a way to exploit poor women. “The 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. 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 documents mentioned.
Over the 11 years of his papacy, Pope Francis reached out more than any previous pope to the LGBTQ+ community, stating that all children should be welcomed by the Catholic Church. But he also defined “gender theory” as an “ugly ideology.”
