For the past two weeks in the newsletter we have been looking at the Vatican’s latest document on Human Dignity, Dignitas Infinita. The document seeks to offer a broad survey of many of the modern threats to human dignity, including some that have only really appeared in the last decade or so. As new ideologies and technologies emerge, they have an impact on the socio-political, moral, and legislative norms of our culture. The creation of these new frontiers requires moral guidance from the Church to provide much needed moral clarity for the Christian faithful in terms of how they respond to these challenges in light of the Gospel. Among the most recent of these challenges is the development of so-called “Gender Theory” that has become especially prevalent in Western societies effecting huge changes in the domains of education, politics, law, medicine, and so on. Because the language of “human rights” has been specifically invoked as a justification for much of the embrace of Gender theory (we think for example of the slogan “Trans rights are human rights”) it is especially critical for the Church to offer a correct anthropology, one that affirms the fundamental goodness of the human person as an embodied being created by God with innate sexual difference: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27).
Any anthropology that seeks to fracture gender into an unlimited spectrum of identities is implicitly subverting the meaning of sexual difference, and thereby confusing the biblical understanding of man as the ‘imago Dei’. The complementarity of the sexes, male and female, is not a social construct but rather created by God. The meaning of sexual difference finds its fulfillment in the covenant of marital love which reflects the truth that we are created by God for Communion. The generative, life-giving self-donation of spouses reflects the life of the Trinity – the God who is a communion of Love. We receive our human nature as a gift from the creator, just as we receive the gift of life from God. Our human nature is rooted in biology but also extends to the realm of psychological and spiritual – as we seek to understand the truth of who we are as reflections of God’s own image and likeness.
The exponential growth of the phenomenon of transgenderism in the digital era is an extreme manifestation of the culture’s deep confusion over the meaning of sexual difference. This has created a new medical frontier that offers the false promise to enable an individual to transition from one sex to another. The disastrous health impacts of these surgeries and the long-term dependence on hormone therapies are already becoming apparent. Such an act of violence to one’s bodily integrity can never be in conformity to God’s desire for the individual, however deep the confusion over one’s sexual identity may be. To support such radical surgeries is to participate in a lie that will always be harmful to the individual. The Church ought, indeed, to be concerned by the confusion that Gender Theory causes, especially to the young and mentally fragile who are especially vulnerable. (Fr Francis Denton)
Declaration of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith “Dignitas Infinita” on Human Dignity (08.04.2024)
Gender Theory
55. The Church wishes, first of all, “to reaffirm that every person, regardless of sexual orientation, ought to be respected in his or her dignity and treated with consideration, while ‘every sign of unjust discrimination’ is to be carefully avoided, particularly any form of aggression and violence.”[101] For this reason, it should be denounced 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.
56. At the same time, the Church highlights the definite critical issues present in gendertheory. On this point, Pope Francis has reminded us that “the path to peace calls for respect for human rights, in accordance with the simple yet clear formulation contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose seventy-fifth anniversary we recently celebrated. These principles are self-evident and commonly accepted. Regrettably, in recent decades, attempts have been made to introduce new rights that are neither fully consistent with those originally defined nor always acceptable. They have led to instances of ideological colonization, in which gender theory plays a central role; the latter is extremely dangerous since it cancels differences in its claim to make everyone equal.”[102]
57. Regarding gender theory, whose scientific coherence is the subject of considerable debate among experts, the Church recalls that human life in all its dimensions, both physical and spiritual, is a gift from God. This gift is to be accepted with gratitude and placed at the service of the good. Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.
58. Another prominent aspect of gender theory is that it intends to deny the greatest possible difference that exists between living beings: sexual difference. This foundational difference is not only the greatest imaginable difference but is also the most beautiful and most powerful of them. In the male-female couple, this difference achieves the most marvellous of reciprocities. It thus becomes the source of that miracle that never ceases to surprise us: the arrival of new human beings in the world.
59. In this sense, respect for both one’s own body and that of others is crucial in light of the proliferation of claims to new rights advanced by gender theory. This ideology “envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family.”[103] It thus becomes unacceptable that “some ideologies of this sort, which seek to respond to what are at times understandable aspirations, manage to assert themselves as absolute and unquestionable, even dictating how children should be raised. It needs to be emphasized that ‘biological sex and the socio-cultural role of sex (gender) can be distinguished but not separated.’”[104] Therefore, all attempts to obscure reference to the ineliminable sexual difference between man and woman are to be rejected: “We cannot separate the masculine and the feminine from God’s work of creation, which is prior to all our decisions and experiences, and where biological elements exist which are impossible to ignore.”[105] Only by acknowledging and accepting this difference in reciprocity can each person fully discover themselves, their dignity, and their identity.
Sex Change
60. The dignity of the body cannot be considered inferior to that of the person as such. The Catechism of the Catholic Church expressly invites us to recognize that “the human body shares in the dignity of ‘the image of God.’”[106] Such a truth deserves to be remembered, especially when it comes to sex change, for humans are inseparably composed of both body and soul. In this, the body serves as the living context in which the interiority of the soul unfolds and manifests itself, as it does also through the network of human relationships. Constituting the person’s being, the soul and the body both participate in the dignity that characterizes every human.[107] Moreover, the body participates in that dignity as it is endowed with personal meanings, particularly in its sexed condition.[108] It is in the body that each person recognizes himself or herself as generated by others, and it is through their bodies that men and women can establish a loving relationship capable of generating other persons. Teaching about the need to respect the natural order of the human person, Pope Francis affirmed that “creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift. At the same time, we are called to protect our humanity, and this means, in the first place, accepting it and respecting it as it was created.”[109] It follows that any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception. This is not to exclude the possibility that a person with genital abnormalities that are already evident at birth or that develop later may choose to receive the assistance of healthcare professionals to resolve these abnormalities. However, in this case, such a medical procedure would not constitute a sex change in the sense intended here.